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<^sM.rs3^3j^ LYELL'S 
TRAVELS IN NORTH AMERICA 
IN THE YEARS 1841-2 



ABRIDGED AND EDITED BY JOHN P. GUSHING. Ph. D., 
HEAD MASTER OF THE NEW HAVEN HIGH SCHOOL, 
SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS IN KNOX COLLEGE 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES E. MERRILL CO. 

44-60 East Twenty-third Street 






ni 



Copyright, 1909 

BY 

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO. 



CI.A*^5i9l7 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 

Pages 9-11 
CHAPTER I 

Voyage — Harbour of Halifax — Excursions near Boston — Differ- 
ence of Plants from European Species — Springfield — New Ha- 
ven — Scenery of the Hudson — Albany — Mohawk Valley — 
Prosperity and Rapid Progress of the People — Lake Ontario. 

Pages 15-26 

CHAPTER II 

Distant and Near View of the Falls of Niagara — Whether the 
Falls Have Receded from Queenston to Their Present Site — 
Reflections on the Lapse of Past Time. 

Pages 27-32 

CHAPTER III 

Tour from the Niagara to the Northern Frontier of Pennsylvania 
— Scenery — Sudden Growth of New Towns — Humming Birds 
— Nomenclature of Places — Refractory Tenants — Travelling 
in the States— Politeness of Women — Domestic Service — 
Progress of Civilization — Philadelphia — Fire-Engines. 

Pages 33-48 

CHAPTER IV 

(Omitted: Scientific Observations.) 

3 



4 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

Wooded Ridges of the Alleghany Mountains — German Patois in 
Pennsylvania — Election of a Governor at Trenton and at 
Philadelphia — Journey to Boston — Boston the Seat of Com- 
merce, of Government, and of a University — Lectures at the 
Lowell Institute — Influence of Oral Instruction in Literature 
and Science — BUnd Asylum — Lowell Factory — National 
Schools — Society in Boston. 

Pages 49-64 

CHAPTER VI 

Fall of Snow and Sleigh-Driving at Boston — Journey to New Ha- 
ven — Income of Farmers — Baltimore — Washington — Natural 
Impediments to the Growth of Washington — Why Chosen for 
the Capital — Richmond. 

Pages 65-71 

CHAPTER VII 

Pine Barrens of Virginia and North Carolina — Railway Train 
Stopped by Snow and Ice — The Great Dismal Swamp — Soil 
Formed Entirely of Vegetable Matter — Rises Higher Than the 
Contiguous Firm Land — Buried Timber — Lake in the Middle. 

Pages 72-77 

CHAPTER VIII 

Tour to Charleston, South Carolina — Facilities of Locomotion — 
Augusta — Voyage Down the Savannah River — Fever and 
Ague — Pine Forests of Georgia — Alligators and Land-Tortoises 
— Warmth of Climate in January — Passports Required of 
Slaves, 

Pages 78-90 



CONTENTS 5 

CHAPTER IX 

Return to Charleston — Severe Frost in 1835 in South CaroHna — 
Causes of the Increased Insalubrity of the Low Regions of 
South Carolina — Condition of Slave Population — Gradual 
Emancipation Equally Desirable for the Whites and the 
Coloured Race. 

Pages 91-96 
CHAPTER X 

Wilmington, N. C. — Mount Vernon — Return to Philadelphia — 
Reception of Mr. Dickens. 

Pages 97-100 

CHAPTER XI 

Philadelphia — Financial Crisis — Payments of State Dividends 
Suspended — General Distress and Private Losses of the Amer- 
icans — Debt of Pennsylvania — Public Works — Direct Taxes — 
Deficient Revenue — Bad Faith and Confiscation — Solvency 
and Good Faith of the Majority of the States — Confidence of 
American Capitalists — General Progress of Society, and 
Prospects of the Republic. 

Pages 101-105 

CHAPTER XII 

New York City — Residence in New York — Effects on Society of 
Increased Intercourse of Distant States — Separation of the 
Capital and Metropolis — Climate — Lectures for the Working 
Classes. 

Pages 106-110 
CHAPTER XIII 

Popular Libraries in New England — Large Sales of Literary 
Works in the United States — American Universities — Har- 
vard College near Boston — Enghsh Universities — Peculiar- 
ities of Their System. 

Pages 111-116 



6 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XIV 

Dr. Channing — Agitation in Rhode Island — Armed Convention — 
Journey to Philadelphia and Baltimore — Harper's Ferry — 
Passage over the Alleghanies by National Road — Parallel 
Ridges — Kentucky Fanners — Emigrants. 

Pages 117-125 

CHAPTER XV 

Alleghany Mountains — Union — Horizontal Coal Formations — 
Brownsville on the Monongahela — Facilities of Working Coal — 
Navigable Rivers — Great Future Resources of the Country — 
Pittsburg — Fossil Indian Corn — Indian Mounds near Wheel- 
ing — General Harrison on Their High Antiquity — Dr. Morton 
on the Aboriginal Indians — Remarks on the Civihzation of 
the Mexicans and Other Tribes — Marietta — New Settlements — 
Cincinnati. 

Pages 126-138 

CHAPTER XVI 

(Omitted: Scientific Observations.) 



CHAPTER XVII 

Excursion to the Swamps of Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky — Noble 
Forest — Salt Springs — Buffalo Trails — Numerous Bones of Ex- 
tinct Animals. 

Pages 139-144 

CHAPTER XVIII 

Cincinnati — Journey Across Ohio to Cleveland — New Clearings — 
Rapid Progress of the State Since the Year 1800 — Increase of 



CONTENTS 7 

Population in the United States— Political Discussions — 
Stump Oratory — Relative Value of Labor and Land. 

Pages 145-149 

CHAPTER XIX 

Cleveland— Fredonia; Streets Lighted with Natural Gas— Falls 
of Niagara— Burning Spring— Passing Behind the Falls- 
Daguerreotype of the Falls. 

Pages 150-152 

CHAPTER XX 

Mirage on Lake Ontario— Toronto— Excursion with Mr. Roy- 
Rapid Progress of the Colony— British Settlers Unable to 
Speak Enghsh. 

Pages 153-155 

CHAPTER XXI 

Kingston— Montreal — French Population and Language — Que- 
bec — Burlington, Vermont — Scenery of Lake Champlain — Inns 
and Boarding-Houses — Return to Boston. 

Pages 156-160 

CHAPTER XXII 

(Omitted: Scientific Observations.) 

CHAPTER XXIII 

Halifax— High Tides in the Bay of Fundy— Progress and Re- 
sources of Nova Scotia — Promotion of Science — Nova Scotians 
"going home" — Return to England. 

Pages 161-167 

NOTES 

Pages 169-172 



INTRODUCTION 

Sir Charles Lyell, a noted English geologist, was born at Kin- 
nordy, Forfarshire, Scotland, November 14, 1797, and died in 
London, February 22, 1875. His boyhood home in the New 
Forest gave him large opportunities for the cultivation of the 
natural sciences, toward which he had a strong inclination. He 
was a student in Exeter College, Oxford, and was graduated 
in 1821. He immediately began the study of law, entering Lin- 
coln's Inn, and in 1825 was called to the bar. But his favorite 
science drew him away from the legal profession, and he became 
a geologist, a friend and companion of his former Oxford pro- 
fessor of geology. Dr. Buckland. In 1819 he was elected a mem- 
ber of the Linnean and Geological Societies; and in 1822 he read 
his first paper, "On the Marls of Forfarshire," before the latter 
society. In 1823 he went to France with introductions to Cuvier, 
Humboldt and other men of science; and in 1824 he made a geo- 
logical tour in Scotland in company with Dr. Buckland. In 1826 
he was elected fellow of the Royal Society, from which in later 
years he received its highest honors, the Copley and the Royal 
Medals, 

His principal work. The Principles of Geology, has as a second- 
ary title "An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the 
Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation." This 
was the theme to which he devoted his life. Between 1830, the 
year of the appearance of the first volume of the " Principles," and 
1872, eleven editions were published; and only a few days before 
his death, he finished revising the twelfth edition, which appeared 
in 1876. The Elements of Geology, published in 1836, went through 
six editions in the author's lifetime. The Student's Manual of the 
Elements of Geology was based upon this latter work. The An- 

9 



10 INTRODUCTION 

tiquity of Man, published in 1863, ran through three editions in 
one year. 

Lyell held for a short time in 1831 the professorship of geology 
at King's College, London; but whenever his literary duties 
would permit, he lost no opportunity of exploring distant lands 
in the interests of science. In 1834 he made an excursion to 
Denmark and Sweden, and again in 1837. And besides the 
British Isles, his investigations carried him to Belgium, Switzer- 
land, Germany, Spain, Madeira, Teneriffe, Sicily and the United 
States. 

Lyell visited this country in 1841, having been invited to de- 
liver the Lowell Lectures in Boston. He remained here until the 
Fall of the following year, and took the opportunity of traveling 
widely over a large portion of the northern and middle states. 
His work, Travels in North America in the Years 1841-2, gives 
one a good account of men and manners in this country from the 
viewpoint of a foreigner. He again visited this country in 1845, 
and left his account of the trip in A Second Visit to the United 
States. 

Lyell received the honor of Knighthood in 1848; and in the 
year 1864, when he was president of the British Association, he 
was created a baronet. In his advanced years, his sight, always 
feeble, failed him altogether. He died, as has been stated, in 
1875; and was buried in Westminister Abbey. He holds first 
rank among geologists; and belongs to that group of great Eng- 
lish scientists, among whom were Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and 
Spencer. 

In the present edition, the technical geological portions of the 
work have been omitted; yet it is hoped that this volume will 
not remind one of the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. 
There is so much of genuine interest here, there are so many re- 
flections upon the political, social and industrial life of the new 
nation, that it is believed that this will be a stimulating work to 
place in any student's hands. The quaint old-fashioned style 
will be admired for its simplicity; and the retention of the orig- 
inal spelling and punctuation will meet with approval. Lyell 



INTRODUCTION 11 

observed as a scientist, and wrote as a scientist; and his cautious 
manner of expressing himself upon doubtful points appears time 
and again. He states nothing as definite and decided unless his 
scientific mind has so determined it. The stimulant to the reader 
comes with the constant flood of contrasts or comparisons that 
are suggested by the text. Life in 1841 was in almost every re- 
spect different from the life of to-day; and the reader will uncon- 
sciously turn his thoughts to present day affairs, and compare 
them with the statements printed in this book. This suggestion 
of ideas is of great educational importance. 

It is interesting to note that at the time Sir Charles Lyell vis- 
ited this country, Tyler was President. General Harrison had 
been inaugurated on March 4th, 1841, and died one month later. 
The population of the United States in 1840 was 17,069,453. 
There were twenty-six states in the Union; Florida had not been 
admitted, nor had West Virginia. The most western States were 
Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. The 
country was passing through a period of severe financial depres- 
sion, which began in 1837. Railways had been projected and 
begim. In 1830 there were four short roads with an aggregate of 
twenty-three miles. In 1840 there were 2,818 miles of railway. 
Ocean vessels were successfully propelled by steam in 1838; and 
the screw-propeller was invented at this time. Friction matches 
were invented in 1829, and the McCormick reaper in 1834. The 
wires of the electric telegraph had been strung along Broadway, 
New York, between 1841 and 1845. Newspapers were beginning 
to be prominent features in our political life. A group of great 
Americans, — Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, Bancroft, Emer- 
son and Holmes, — had begun their work; and, in general, the 
great upward movement, which had begun in Europe in 1832, 
had spread to this country. 

J. P. C. 



LYELL'S TRAVELS 



LYELL'S TRAVELS 



CHAPTER I 

Voyage — Harbour of Halifax — Excursions near Boston — Differ- 
ence of Plants from European Species — Springfield — New Haven — 
Scenery of the Hudson — Albany — Mohawk Valley — Prosperity and 
rapid Progress of the People — Lake Ontario. 

July 20, 1841. — Sailed from Liverpool for Boston, 
U. S., in the steamship Acadia, which held her course 
as straight as an arrow from Cape Clear in Ireland to 
Halifax in Nova Scotia, making between 220 and 280 
miles per day.^ 

After the monotony of a week spent on the open sea, 
we were amused when we came near the great banks 
which extend from the southern point of Newfound- 
land, by the rapid passage of the steamer through al- 
ternate belts of stationary fog and clear spaces warmed 
and lighted up with bright sunshine. Looking at the 
dense fog from the intermediate sunny regions, we could 
hardly be persuaded that we were not beholding land, 
so distinct and well-defined was its outline, and such 
the varieties of light and shade, that some of our Cana- 
dian passengers compared it to the patches of cleared 
and uncleared country on the north shore of the St. 
Lawrence. These fogs are caused by the meeting, over 

15 



16 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

the great banks, of the warm waters of the gulf stream 
flowing from the south, and colder currents, often 
charged with floating ice, from the north, by which, 
very opposite states in the relative temperature of the 
sea and atmosphere are produced in spaces closely 
contiguous. In places where the sea is warmer than 
the air, fogs are generated. 

When the eye has been accustomed for many days 
to the deep blue of the central Atlantic, the greener 
tint of the sea over the banks is refreshing. We were 
within 150 miles of the southern point of Newfoundland 
when we crossed these banks, over which the shallowest 
water is said to be about thirty-five fathoms deep. The 
bottom consists of fine sand, which must be often 
ploughed up by icebergs, for several of them were seen 
aground here by some of our passengers on the 31st of 
July last. The captain tells us that the worst months 
for crossing the Atlantic to and from Halifax are Feb- 
ruary and March, and the most agreeable ones, July, 
August and September. The nearer w^e approached the 
American coast, the more beautiful and brilliant were 
the sunsets. We sometimes compared the changing 
hues of the clouds and sky to the blue and red colours 
in a pigeon's neck. 

July 31. — On the eleventh day of our voyage we 
sailed directly into the harbour of Halifax, which by its 
low hills of granite and slate, covered with birch and 
spruce fir, reminded me more of a Norwegian Fiord, 
such as that of Chrlstiania, than of any other place I 
had seen. I landed here for six hours, with my wife, 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 17 

during which we had time to drive about the town, and 
see the museum, where I was shown a large fossil tree 
filled with sandstone, recently sent from strata ^ con- 
taining coal in the interior. I resolved to examine 
these before returning to England, as they appeared, 
by the description given us, to afford the finest ex- 
amples yet known in the world of petrified trees occur- 
ring in their natural or erect position. 

Letters which we had written on the voyage, being 
now committed to the post-office at Halifax, were taken 
up next day by the Caledonia steam-ship for England, 
and in less than a month from the time of our quitting 
London, our friends in the remote parts of Great Britain 
(in Scotland and in Devonshire) were reading an ac- 
count of the harbour of Halifax, of the Micmac Indi- 
ans with their Esquimaux features, paddling about in 
canoes of birch bark, and other novelties seen on the 
shores of the New World. It required the aid of the re- 
cently established railroads at home, as well as the 
Atlantic steam-packets, to render such rapid corre- 
spondence possible. 

August 2. — A run of about thirty hours carried us to 
Boston, which we reached in twelve and a half days 
after leaving Liverpool. The heat here is intense, 
the harbour and city beautiful, the air clear and en- 
tirely free from smoke, so that the shipping may be 
seen far off, at the end of many of the streets. The 
Tremont Hotel merits its reputation as one of the best 
in the world. Recollecting the contrast of everything 
French when I first crossed the straits of Dover^ I am 



18 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

astonished, after having traversed the wide ocean, at 
the resemblance of every thing I see and hear to things 
familiar at home. It has so often happened to me in 
our own island, without travelling into those parts of 
Wales, Scotland, or Ireland, where they talk a perfectly 
distinct language, to encounter provincial dialects 
which it is difficult to comprehend, that I wonder at 
finding the people here so very English. If the metrop- 
olis of New England be a type of a large part of the 
United States, the industry of Sam Slick, ^ and other 
writers, in collecting together so many diverting 
Americanisms and so much original slang, is truly 
great, or their inventive powers still greater. 

I made excursions to the neighborhood of Boston,^ 
through Roxbury, Cambridge, and other places, with a 
good botanist, to whom I had brought letters of intro- 
duction. Although this is not the best season for wild 
flowers, the entire distinctness of the trees, shrubs, and 
plants, from those on the other side of the Atlantic, 
affords a constant charm to the European traveller. 
We admired the drooping American elm, a picturesque 
tree; and saw several kinds of sumach, oaks with deeply 
indented leaves, dwarf birches, and several wild roses. 
Large commons without heaths reminded me of the 
singular fact that no species of heath is indigenous on 
the American continent. We missed also the small 
''crimson-tipped" daisy on the green lawns, and were 
told that they have been often cultivated with care, 
but are found to wither when exposed to the dry air 
and bright sunshine of this climate. When weeds so 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 19 

common with us cannot be reared here, we cease to 
wonder at the dissimilarity of the native flora of the 
New World. Yet whenever the aboriginal forests are 
cleared, we see orchards, gardens, and arable lands, 
filled with the same fruit trees, the same grain and 
vegetables, as in Europe, so bountifully has Nature pro- 
vided that the plants most useful to man should be 
capable, like himself, of becoming cosmopolites. 

Aug. 9. — After a week spent very agreeably at Bos- 
ton, we started for New Haven in Connecticut, going 
the first hundred miles on an excellent railway in about 
five hours, for three dollars each.^ The speed of the 
railways in this state, the most populous in the Union, 
is greater than elsewhere, and I am told that they are 
made with American capital, and for the most part pay 
good interest.^ There are no tunnels, and so few em- 
bankments that they afford the traveller a good view 
of the country. The number of small lakes and ponds, 
such as are seen in the country between Lund and Stock- 
holm in Sweden, affords a pleasing variety to the scen- 
ery, and they are as useful as they are ornamental. The 
water is beautifully clear, and when frozen to the depth 
of many feet in winter, supplies those large cubical 
masses of ice, which are sawed and transported to the 
principal cities throughout the Union, and even shipped 
to Calcutta, crossing the equator twice in their outward 
voyage. It has been truly said, that this part of New 
England owes its wealth to its industry, the soil being 
sterile, the timber small, and there being no staple com- 
modities of native growth, except ice and granite. 



20 LYELUS TRAVELS 

In the inland country between Boston and Spring- 
field, we saw some sand-hills like the dunes of blown 
sand near the coast, which were probably formed on the 
sea-side before the country w^as elevated to its present 
height. We passed many fields of maize, or Indian 
corn, before arriving at Springfield, which is a beautiful 
village, with fine avenues ^ of the American elm on each 
side of the wide streets. From Springfield we descended 
the river Connecticut in a steamboat. Its banks were 
covered with an elegant species of golden rod, with its 
showy bright yellow flowers. I have been hitherto dis- 
appointed in seeing no large timber, and I am told that 
it was cut down originally in New England without 
mercy, because it served as an ambush for the Indians, 
since which time it has never recovered, being consumed 
largely for fuel. The Americans of these Eastern States 
who visit Europe have, strange to say, derived their 
ideas of noble trees more from those of our principal 
English parks, than from the native forests of the New 
World. 

The city of New Haven, with a population of 14,000 
souls possesses, like Springfield, fine avenues of trees 
in its streets, which mingle agreeably with the buildings 
of the university, and the numerous churches, of which 
we counted near twenty steeples. When attending ser- 
vice, according to the Presbyterian form, in the College 
chapel on Sunday, I could scarcely believe I was not 
in Scotland. 

The East and West Rocks near New Haven, crowned 
with trap, bear a strong resemblance to Salisbury 



LYELUS TRAVELS 21 

Crags, and other hills of the same structure near Edin- 
burgh. We saw in Hampden parish, lat. 4P 19^ on the 
summit of a high hill of sandstone a huge erratic block 
of greenstone, 100 feet in circumference, and projecting 
11 feet above the ground. Other large transported frag- 
ments have been met with more than 1000 feet above 
the level of the sea, and everywhere straight parallel 
furrows appear on the smooth surface of the rocks, 
where the superficial gravel and sand are removed. 

In a garden at New Haven (August 13) I saw, for the 
first time, a humming bird on the wing. It was flutter- 
ing round the flowers of a Gladiolus. In the suburbs 
we gathered a splendid wild flower, the scarlet Lobelia, 
and a large sweet-scented water-lily. The only singing 
bird which we heard was a thrush w^ith a red breast, 
which they call here the robin. The grasshoppers were 
as numerous and as noisy as in Italy. As we returned 
in the evening over some low marshy ground, we saw 
several fire-flies, showing an occasional bright spark. 

Aug. 13. — A large steamer carried us from New 
Haven to New York, a distance of about ninety miles, 
in less than six hours. We had Long Island on the one 
side, and the main land on the other, the scenery at 
first tame from the width of the channel, but very 
lively and striking when this became more contracted, 
and at length we seemed to sail into the very suburbs 
of the great city itself, passing between green islands, 
some of them covered with buildings and villas. We 
had the same bright sunshine which we have enjoyed 
ever since we landed, and an atmosphere unsullied by 



22 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

the chimnies of countless steam-boats, factories, and 
houses of a population of more than 300,000 souls, 
thanks to the remoteness of all fuel save anthracite and 
wood. 

Aug. 16. — Sailed in the splendid new steam-ship the 
Troy, in company with about 500 passengers, from 
New York to Albany, 145 miles, at the rate of about 16 
miles an hour.^ When I was informed that " seventeen 
of these vessels went to a mile", it seemed incredible, 
but I found that in fact the deck measured 300 feet in 
length. To give a sufhcent supply of oxygen to the 
anthracite, the machinery is made to work two bellows, 
which blow a strong current of air into the furnace. 
The Hudson is an arm of the sea or estuary about 
twelve fathoms deep, above New York, and its waters 
are inhabited by a curious mixture of marine and fresh- 
water plants and mollusca. At first on our left, or on 
the western bank, we had a lofty precipice of columnar 
basalt ^ from 400 to 600 feet in height, called the Pali- 
sades, extremely picturesque. This basalt rests on 
sandstone, which is of the same age as that mentioned 
before near New Haven, but has an opposite or west- 
ward dip. On arriving at the Highlands, the winding 
channel is closed in by steep hills of gneiss on both 
sides, and the vessel often holds her course as if bearing 
directly on the land. The stranger cannot guess in 
which direction he is to penetrate the rocky gorge, but 
he soon emerges again into a broad valley, the blue 
Catskill mountains appearing in the distance. The 
scenery deserves all the praise which has been lavished 



LYELVS TRAVELS ^ 

upon it, and when the passage is made in nine hours it 
is full of variety and contrast. 

At Albany, a town finely situated on the Hudson, 
and the capital of the State of New York, I found 
several geologists employed in the Government survey, 
and busily engaged in forming a fine museum, to il- 
lustrate the organic remains and mineral products of 
the country. This state is divided into about the same 
number of counties as England, and is not very inferior 
to it in extent of territory. The legislature four years 
ago voted a considerable sum of money, more than 
200,000 dollars, or 40,000 guineas, for exploring its Nat- 
ural History and Mineral Structure; and at the end of 
the first two years several of the geological surveyors, 
of whom four principal ones were appointed, reported, 
among other results, their opinion, that no coal would 
ever be discovered in their respective districts. This 
announcement caused no small disappointment, es- 
pecially as the neighboring state of Pennsylvania was 
very rich in coal. Accordingly, during my tour, I 
heard frequent complaints that, not satisfied with their 
inability to find coal themselves, the surveyors had 
decided that no one else would ever be able to detect 
any, having had the presumption to pass a sentence of 
future sterility on the whole land. Yet in spite of these 
expressions of ill-humour, it was satisfactory to ob- 
serve that the rashness of private speculators had re- 
ceived a wholesome check; and large sums of money, 
which for twenty years previously had been annually 
squandered in trials for coal in rocks below the car- 



24 LYELVS TRAVELS 

boniferous series, were henceforth 'saved to the public. 
There can be Httle doubt that the advantage derived to 
the resources of the State by the cessation of this annual 
outlay alone, and the more profitable direction since 
given to private enterprise, is sufficient to indemnify 
the country, on mere utilitarian grounds, for the sum 
so munificently expended by the government on geo- 
logical investigations. 

A few years ago it was a fatiguing tour of many weeks 
to reach the Falls of Niagara from Albany. We are now 
carried along at the rate of sixteen miles an hour, on a 
railway often supported on piles, through large swamps 
covered with aquatic trees and shrubs, or through dense 
forests, with occasional clearings where orchards are 
planted by anticipation among the stumps, before they 
have even had time to run up a log house. The travel- 
ler views with surprise, in the midst of so much un- 
occupied land, one flourishing town after another, such 
as Utica, Syracuse, and Auburn. At Rochester he 
admires the streets of large houses, inhabited by 20,000 
souls, where the first settler built his log-cabin in the 
wilderness only twenty-five years ago. At one point 
our train stopped at a handsome new built station- 
house, and looking out at one window, we saw a group 
of Indians of the Oneida tribe, lately owners of the 
broad lands around, but now humbly offering for sale 
a few trinkets, such as baskets ornamented with porcu- 
pine quills, moccasins of moose-deer skin, and boxes of 
birch bark. At the other window stood a well-dressed 
waiter handing ices and confectionery. When we re- 



LYELUS TRAVELS 25 

fleet that some single towns of which the foundations 
were laid by persons still living, can already number a 
population, equal to all the aboriginal hunter tribes 
who possessed the forests for hundreds of miles around, 
we soon cease to repine at the extraordinary revolu- 
tion, however much we may commiserate the unhappy 
fate of the disinherited race. They who are accustomed 
to connect the romance of their travels in Europe or 
Asia with historical recollections and the monuments 
of former glory, with the great masterpieces in the fine 
arts, or with grand and magnificent scenery, will hardly 
believe the romantic sensations which may be inspired 
by the aspect of this region, where very few points of 
picturesque beauty meet the eye, and where the aborig- 
inal forest has lost its charm of savage wildness by the 
intrusion of railways and canals. The foreign natural- 
ist indeed sees novelty in every plant, bird, and insect; 
and the remarkable resemblances of the rocks at so 
great a distance from home are to him a source of 
wonder and instruction. But there are other objects of 
intense interest, to enliven or excite the imagination of 
every traveller. Here, instead of dwelling on the past, 
and on the signs of pomp and grandeur which have van- 
ished, the mind is filled with images of coming power 
and splendour. The vast stride made by one genera- 
tion in a brief moment of time, naturally disposes us to 
magnify and exaggerate the rapid rate of future im- 
provement. The contemplation of so much prosperity, 
such entire absence of want and poverty, so many 
school-houses and churches^ rising everywhere in the 



26 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

woods, and such a general desire of education, with the 
consciousness that a great continent Hes bej^ond, which 
has still to be appropriated, fills the traveller with 
cheering thoughts and sanguine hopes. He may be re- 
minded that there is another side to the picture, that 
where the success has been so ]:)rilliant and where large 
fortunes have been hastily realised, there will be rash 
speculations and bitter disappointments; but these 
ideas do not force themselves into the reveries of the 
passing stranger. He sees around him the solid fruits 
of victory, and forgets that many a soldier in the fore- 
most ranks has fallen in the breach; and cold indeed 
would be his temperament if he did not sympathise 
with the freshness and hopefulness of a new country, 
and feel as men past the prime of life are accustomed to 
feel when in company with the young, who are full of 
health and buoyant spirits, of faith and confidence in 
the future. 



CHAPTER TI 

Distant and near View of the Falls of Niagara — Whether the 
Falls have receded from Queenston to their present Site — Reflections 
on the Lapse of past Time. 

Aug. 27. — We first came in sight of the Falls of 
Niagara when they were about three miles distant. The 
sun was shining full upon them — no building in view — 
nothing but the green wood, the falling water, and the 
white foam. At that moment they appeared to me 
more beautiful than I had expected, and less grand; but 
after several days, when I had enjoyed a nearer view 
of the two cataracts, had listened to their thundering 
sound, and gazed on them for hours from above and 
below, and had watched the river foaming over the 
rapids, then plunging headlong into the dark pool, — 
and when I had explored the delightful island which 
divides the falls, where the solitude of the ancient forest 
is still unbroken, I at last learned by degrees to com- 
prehend the wonders of the scene, and to feel its full 
magnificence. 

Early in the morning after our arrival, I saw from the 
window of our hotel, on the American side, a long train 
of white vapory clouds hanging over the deep chasm 
below the falls. They were slightly tinted by the rays 

27 



28 LYELL'S TRAVELS 

of the rising sun, and blown slowly northward by a 
gentle breeze from the pool below the cataract, which 
was itself invisible from this point of view. No fog was 
rising from the ground, the sky was clear above; and as 
the day advanced, and the air grew warm, the vapours 
all disappeared. The scene reminded me of my first 
view of Mount Etna from Catania, at sunrise in the 
autumn of 1828, when I saw dense volumes of steam 
issuing from the summit of the highest crater in a clear 
blue sky, which, at the height of more than two miles 
above the sea, assumed at once the usual shape and 
hues of clouds in the upper atmosphere. These, too, 
vanished before noon, as soon as the sun's heat in- 
creased. * 

Etna presents us not merely with an image of the 
power of subterranean heat, ]3Ut a record also of the 
vast period of time during which that power has been 
exerted. A majestic mountain has been produced by 
volcanic action, yet the time of which the volcano 
forms the register, however vast, is found by the geolo- 
gist to be of inconsiderable amount, even in thp modern 
annals of the earth's history. In like manner, the Falls 
of Niagara teach us not merely to appreciate the power 
of moving water, but furnish us at the same time with 
data for estimating the enormous lapse of ages during 
Avhich that force has operated. A deep and long ravine 
has been excavated, and the river has required ages to 
accomplish the task, yet the same region affords evi- 
dence that the sum of these ages is as nothing, and as 
the work of yesterday, when compared to the antece- 



I 



LYELUS TRAVELS 29 

dent periods, of which there are monuments in the 
same district. 

It has long been the popular belief, from a mere 
cursory inspection of this district, that the Niagara once 
flowed in a shallow valley across the whole platform 
from the present site of the Falls to the Queenstown 
heights, where it is supposed the cataract was first 
situated, and that the river has been slowly eating its 
way backwards through the rocks for a distance of 
seven miles. According to this hypothesis, the Falls 
must have had originally nearly twice their present 
height, and must have been always diminishing in 
grandeur from age to age, as they will continue to do in 
future so long as the retrograde movement is prolonged. 
It becomes, therefore, a matter of no small curiosity and 
interest to inquire at what rate the work of excavation 
is now going on, and thus to obtain a measure for cal- 
culating how many thousands of years or centuries 
have been required to hollow out the chasm already ex- 
cavated. 

It is an ascertained fact, that the Falls do not remain 
absolutely stationary at the same point of space, and 
that they have shifted their position slightly during 
the last half century. Every observer will also be con- 
vinced that the small portion of the great ravine, which 
has been eroded within the memory of man, is so pre- 
cisely identical in character with the whole gorge for 
seven miles below, that the river supplies an adequate 
cause for executing the task assigned to it, provided we 
grant sufficient time for its completion, 



30 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

The waters, after cutting through strata of lime- 
stone, about fifty feet thick in the rapids, descend 
perpendicularly at the Falls over another mass of 
limestone about ninety feet thick, beneath which lie 
soft shales of equal thickness, continually undermined 
by the action of the spray driven violently by gusts of 
wind against the base of the precipice. In consequence 
of this disintegration, portions of the incumbent rock 
are left unsupported, and tumble down from time to 
time, so that the cataract is made to recede southwards. 
The sudden descent of huge rocky fragments of the un- 
dermined limestone at the Horsehoe Falls in 1828, and 
another at the American Fall in 1818, are said to have 
shaken the adjacent country like an earthquake. Ac- 
cording to the statement of our guide in 1841, Samuel 
Hooker, an indentation of about forty feet has been 
produced in the middle of the ledge of limestone at the 
lesser fall since the year 1815, so that it has begun to 
assume the shape of a crescent, while within the same 
period the Horseshoe Fall has been altered so as less to 
deserve its name. Goat Island has lost several acres 
in the last four years, and I have no doubt that this 
waste neither is, nor has been, a mere temporary acci- 
dent, since I found that the same recession was in prog- 
ress in various other waterfalls which I visited with 
Mr. Hall, in the State of New York. Some of these 
intersect the same rocks as the Niagara — for example, 
the Genesee at Rochester; others are cutting their way 
through newer formations as Allan's Creek below Le 
Roy, or the Genesee at its upper falls at Portage. Mr. 



LYELUS TRAVELS 31 

Bakewell calculated that, in the forty years preceding 
1830, the Niagara had been going back at the rate of 
about a yard annually, but I conceive that one foot per 
year would be a much more probable conjecture, in 
which case 35,000 years would have been required for 
the retreat of the Falls from the escarpment of Queens- 
ton to their present site, if we could assume that the 
retrograde movement had been uniform throughout. 
This, however, could not have been the case, as at every 
step in the process of excavation the height of the 
precipice, the hardness of the materials at its base, 
and the quantity of fallen matter to be removed, must 
have varied. At some points it must have receded 
much faster than at present, at others much slower, 
and it would be scarcely possible to decide whether 
its average progress has been more or less rapid than 
now. 

Many have been the successive revolutions in organic 
life, and many the vicissitudes in the physical geog- 
raphy of the globe, and often has the sea been con- 
verted into land, and land into sea, since that rock was 
formed. The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Himalaya, have 
not only begun to exist as lofty mountain chains, but 
the solid materials of which they are composed have 
been slowly elaborated beneath the sea within the 
stupendous interval of ages here alluded to. 

The geologist may muse and speculate on these events 
until, filled with awe and admiration, he forgets the 
presence of the mighty cataract itself, and no longer 
sees the rapid motion of its waters, nor hears their 



32 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

sound, as they fall into the deep abyss. But whenever 
his thoughts are recalled to the present, the tone of his 
mind, — the sensations awakened in his soul, will be 
found to be in perfect harmony with the grandeur and 
beauty of the glorious scene which surrounds him. 



CHAPTER III 

Tour from the Niagara to the Northern Frontier of Pennsylvania 
— Scenery — Sudden Growth of New Towns — Humming Birds — 
Nomenclature of Places — Refractory Tenants — Travelling in the 
States — Politeness of Women — Domestic Service — Progress of CiV' 
ilization — Philadelphia — Fire-engines. 

Sept. 2, 1841. — From Niagara Falls we travelled to 
the large town of Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie, 
and then passed through Williamsville, Le Roy, and 
Geneseo, in the State of New York. When at the vil- 
lage of Geneseo, I learnt that ten years before, the bones 
of a Mastodon had been obtained from a bog in the 
neighbourhood. At the Falls of Le Roy, and at the 
Upper Falls of the River Geneseo at Portage, I had 
opportunities of observing how both of these cascades 
have been cutting their way backwards through the 
Silurian rocks, even within the memory of the present 
settlers. They have each hollowed out a deep ravine 
with perpendicular sides, bearing the same proportion 
in volume to the body of water flowing through them 
which the great ravine of the Niagara does to that river. 

Mr. Hall took leave of us at, Geneseo, after which I 
set out on a tour to examine the series of rocks between 
the upper Silurian strata of the State of New York and 
the Coal of Pennsylvania. With this in view I took the 

33 



34 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

direction of Blossberg, where the most northern coal 
mines of the United States are worked. 

On this occasion we left the main road, and entered, 
for the first time, an American stage-coach, having 
been warned not to raise our expectations too high in 
regard to the ease or speed of our conveyance. Ac- 
cordingly, we found that after much fatigue we had 
only accomplished a journey of 46 miles in 12 hours. 
We had four horses; and when I complained at one of 
the inns that our coachman seemed to take pleasure in 
driving rapidly over deep ruts and the roughest ground, 
it was explained to me that this was the first time in 
his life he had ever attempted to drive any vehicle, 
whether two or four-wheeled. The coolness and con- 
fidence with which every one here is ready to try his 
hand at any craft is truly amusing. A few days after- 
wards I engaged a young man to drive me in a gig from 
Tioga to Blossberg. On the wny, he pointed out, first, 
his father's property, and then a farm of his own, which 
he had lately purchased. As he was not yet twenty 
years of age, I expressed surprise that he had got on so 
well in the world, when he told me that he had been 
editor of the "Tioga Democrat" for several years, but 
had now sold his share of the newspaper. 

In the region between Lake Erie and the borders of 
Pennsylvania, as well as in that immediately south of 
Lake Ontario, there is an entire want of fine scenery, 
as might have been anticipated where all the strata 
are horizontal. The monotony of the endless forest is 
sometimes relieved by a steep escarpment , a river with 



LYELVS TRAVELS 35 

wooded islands, or a lake; but the only striking fea- 
tures of the landscape are the waterfalls, and the deep 
chasms hollowed out by them in the course of ages. As 
the opposite banks of these ravines are on the 'jamo 
level, including that of the Niagara itself, we come 
abruptly to their edges before we have any suspicion 
of their existence, and we must travel out of our way 
to enjoy a sight of them. 

At length we reached the water-shed, where the 
streams flow, on one side, northwards to Lake Ontario, 
and on the other, southwards, to the Susquehanna. I 
began to wonder how the Indians ever obtained any 
correct notions of topography in so continuous a forest, 
all the smaller rivers, with their islands, being embow- 
ered and choked up with trees. I soon ceased to repine 
at the havoc that was going on in the fine timber which 
bounded our road on every side. 

I found a proprietor on Spalding's Creek preparing 
to sink a costly shaft for coal, and I earnestly dissuaded 
him from his project, referring him to the New York 
survey. Every scientific man who discourages a favour- 
ite mining scheme must make up his mind to be as ill 
received as the physician who gives an honest opinion 
that his patient's disorder is incurable. 

Sept. 5. — At Bath I hired a private carriage for Corn- 
ing. Although there are two railways here with Loco- 
motive Engines, one leading to the south, the other 
for conveying the coal of Blossberg to the Erie canal, 
I looked in vain for the name of Corning in a newly- 
published map and was informed that the town was 



36 LYELVS TRAVELS 

only two years old. Already the school-house was 
finished, the spire of the Methodist church nearly com- 
plete, the Presbyterian one in the course of ]:)uilding, 
the site of the Episcopalian decided on. Wishing to 
have a carriage, I was taken to a large livery stable, 
where there were several vehicles and good horses. 
The stumps of trees, some six feet high, are still stand- 
ing in the gardens and between the houses. Our inn- 
keeper remarked that the cost of uprooting them would 
be nearly equal to that of erecting a log-house on the 
same place. I amused myself by counting the rings 
of annual growth in these trees, and found that some 
had been only forty years old when cut down, yet 
when these began to grow, no white man had ap- 
proached within many leagues of this valley; most of 
the older stumps went back no farther than two cen- 
turies, or to the landing of the pilgrim fathers, some 
few to the time of Sir Walter Raleigh, and scarcely one 
to the days of Columbus. I had before remarked that 
very ancient trees seemed uncommon in the aboriginal 
forests of this part of America. They are usually tall 
and straight, with no grass growing under their dark 
shade, although the green herbage soon springs up 
when the wood is removed and the sun's rays allowed 
to penetrate. Some of the stumps, especially those of 
the fir tribe, take fifty years to rot away, though ex- 
posed in the air to alternations of rain and sunshine, a 
fact on which every geologist will do well to reflect, 
for it is clear that the trees of a forest submerged be- 
neath the waters, or still more, if entirely excluded 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 37 

from air, by becoming imbedded in sediment, may en- 
dm-e for centmies without decay, so that there may 
have been ample time for the slow petrifaction of erect 
fossil trees in the Carboniferous ^ and other formations, 
or for the slow accumulation around them of a great 
succession of strata. 

I asked the landlord of the inn at Corning, who was 
very attentive to his guests, to find ray coachman. He 
immediately called out in the bkr-room, ''Where is 
the gentleman that brought this man here?" A few 
days before, a farmer in New York had styled my wife 
''the woman," though he called his own daughters 
ladies, and would, I believe, have freely extended that 
title to their maid-servant. I w^as told of a witness in 
a late trial at Boston, who stated in evidence that 
"while he and another gentleman were shovelling up 
mud" &c.; from which it appears that the spirit of 
social equality has left no other signification to the 
terms "gentleman" and "lady" but that of "male and 
female individual." 

Dr. Saynisch, who was the first to explore the coal 
in this region, told me that, soon after he settled here, 
he shot a wolf out of his bedroom w^inclow. These 
animals still commit havoc on the flocks, and last au- 
tumn a large panther was killed in the outskirts of 
Blossberg, but the bears have not been seen for several 
years. We rode in a hot sunny day to a large clearing 
in the forest far away from any habitation, and I was 
struck with the perfect silence of the surrounding woods. 
We heard no call or note of any bird, nothing to remind 



38 LYELUS TRAVELS 

us of the chirping of the chaffinch or autumnal song of 
the robin, the grasshoppers and crickets alone keeping 
up a ceaseless din day and night. The birds here are 
very abundant, and some are adorned with brilliant 
plumage, as the large woodpecker, with its crimson 
head, the yellow-bird, of the size of a yellow-hammer, 
with black wings and a bright yellow body, and the 
red-bird. 

A hen humming-bird, far less brilliant in its plumage 
than the male, flew within a few inches of my face. Its 
flight and diminutive size reminded me of our humming 
sphinx, or hawk-moth, like which it remains poised in 
the air while sucking the flowers, the body seeming 
motionless, and the wings being invisible from the swift- 
ness of their vibrations. I had before seen one in the 
wood at Cedarville, sucking the flower of a wild balsam. 
Dr. Saynisch tells me that on his first visit to these 
woods, he has known two of these birds at a time to 
perch on the edge of a cup of water which he held in 
his hand, and drink without fear. I was aware from 
Mr. Darwin's Voyage in the Beagle, that in islands 
like the Galapagos, 

"Where human foot hath ne'er or rarely been," 

the wild birds have no apprehension of danger from 
man; but here, where for ages the Indian hunters pre- 
ceded the whites, I am surprised to learn that an in- 
stinctive dread of the great ''usurper" had not be- 
come hereditary in the feathered tribe. I was told, 
however, that in the hunting grounds called Indian 



LYELUS TRAVELS 39 

Reservations, within the limits of the settled and civi- 
lized states, of which we passed one in New York, the 
wild animals are comparatively tame, it being a system 
of the Indians never to molest the game or their prey, 
except when required for food. 

We returned from Blossberg by the town of Jefferson, 
and, sailing down Seneca Lake in a steamboat to Ge- 
neva, joined the railway, which carried us back again to 
Albany. At one of the stations where the train stopped 
we overheard some young women from Ohio exclaim, 
'' Well, we are in a pretty fix! " and found their dilemma 
to be characteristic of the financial crisis of these times, 
for none of their dollar notes of the Ohio banks would 
pass here.^ The substantive ''fix" is an acknowledged 
vulgarism, but the verb is used in New England by well- 
educated people, in the sense of the French ''arranger''' 
or the English ''do." To fix the hair, the table, the 
fire, means to dress the hair, lay the table, and make up 
the fire; and this application is, I presume, of Hibernian 
origin, as an Irish gentleman. King Corney, in Miss 
Edgeworth's tale of Ormond, says " I'll fix him of his 
wounds." ^ 

There are scarcely any American idioms or words 
which are not of British origin, some obsolete, others 
provincial. When the lexicographer, Noah Webster, 
whom I saw at New Haven, was asked how many new 
words he had coined, he replied one only, "to demor- 
alize," and that not for his dictionary, but long before 
in a pamphlet published in the last century. 

The nomenclature of the places passed through in 



40 LYELVS TRAVELS 

our short excursion of one month was strange enough. 
We had ])een at Syracuse, Utica, Rome, and Parma, 
had gone from Buffalo to Batavia and on the same day 
breakfasted at St. Helena, and dined at Elba. We 
collected fossils at Moscow, and travelled by Painted 
Post and Big Flats to Havanna. After returning by 
Auburn to Albany, I was taken to Troy, a city of 20,000 
inhabitants, that I might see a curious landslip which 
had just happened on Mount Olympus, the western 
side of that hill, together with a contiguous portion of 
Mount Ida, having slid down into the Hudson, and 
caused the death of several persons. Fortunately, some 
few of the Indian names, such as Mohawk, Ontario, 
Oneida, Canandaigua, and Niagara, are retained. Al- 
though legislative interference in behalf of good taste 
would not be justifiable. Congress might interpose for 
the sake of the post-office, and prevent the future mul- 
tiplication of the same name for villages, cities, counties, 
and townships. An Englishman, it is true, cannot com- 
plain, for we follow the same system in our colonies; 
and it is high time that the postmaster-general brought 
in a bill for prohibiting new streets in London from re- 
ceiving names already appropriated and repeated fifty 
times in that same city, to the infinite confusion of the 
inhabitants and their letter-carriers. 

We then made a tour to the Helderberg Mountains, 
S. W. of Albany. I rejoiced to see the sugar-maple, an 
ornamental tree, spared in the clearings. The sap from 
which sugar is made was everywhere trickling down the 
wooden troughs from gashes made in the bark.^ The 



LYELUS TRAVELS 41 

red maples were now beginning to assume their bright 
autumnal tints, but the rest of the forest was as ver- 
dant as ever; a blue Lobelia, which we had gathered 
at the Falls of Niagara was still in bloom, together 
with many white and blue asters which had only just 
come out. The most elegant flower in the woods at 
this season is the fringed gentian. 

" Bright with Autumn's dew, 
And colour'd with the Heaven's own blue." 

One day at Schoharie, a hawk pounced down from 
a lofty tree, and seized a striped squirrel on the ground, 
within three yards of our party. It was bearing off 
its burden with ease, until, alarmed by our shouts, it 
dropped the squirrel, which ran off apparently unhurt. 
I observed early in the morning myriads of cobwebs ex- 
tending from one blade of grass to another, as we often 
see them on an English lawn before the dew is dried up. 

On our way back from Schoharie to Albany, we found 
the country people in a ferment, a sheriff's officer hav- 
ing been seriously wounded when in the act of distrain- 
ing for rent, this being the third year of the ^^Hel- 
derberg war," or a successful resistance by an armed 
tenantry to the legal demands of their landlord, Mr. 
Van Renssalaer. It appears that a large amount of ter- 
ritory on both sides of the river Hudson, now support- 
ing, according to some estimates, a population of 100,000 
souls, had long been held in fee by the Van Renssalaer 
family, the tenants paying a small ground rent. This 
system of things is regarded by many as not only in- 



42 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

jurious, because it imposes grievous restraints upon 
alienation, but as unconstitutional, or contrary to the 
genius of their political institutions, and tending to 
create a sort of feudal perpetuity. Some of the leases 
have already been turned into fees, but many of the 
tenants were unable or unwilling to pay the prices asked 
for such conveyances, and declared that they had paid 
rent long enough, and that it was high time that they 
should be owners of the land. 

A few years ago, when the estates descended from the 
late General Van Renssalaer to his sons, the attempt 
to enforce the landlord's rights met with open opposi- 
tion. The courts of law gave judgment, and the sheriff 
of Albany having failed to execute his process, at length 
took military force in 1839, but with no better success. 
The governor of New York was then compelled to back 
him with the military array of the state, about 700 men, 
who began the campaign at a clay's notice in a severe 
snow storm. The tenants are said to have mustered 
against them 1500 strong, and the rents were still un- 
paid, when in the following year, 1840, the governor, 
courting popularity, as it should seem, while condemn- 
ing the recusants in his message, virtually encouraged 
them by recommending their case to the favourable 
consideration of the state, hinting at the same time at 
legislative remedies. The legislature, however, to their 
credit, refused to enact these, leaving the case to the 
ordinary courts of law. 

The whole affair is curious, as demonstrating the im- 
possibility of creating at present in this country a class 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 43 

of landed proprietors deriving their income from the 
letting of lands upon lease. Every man must occupy 
his own acres. He who has capital enough to stock a 
farm can obtain land of his own so cheap as naturally 
to prefer being his own landlord. 

Sept. 27, 1841. — We embarked once more on the 
Hudson, to sail from Albany to New York, with several 
hundred passengers on board, and thought the scenery 
more beautiful than ever. The steam-boat is a great 
floating hotel, of wdiich the captain is landlord. He 
presides at meals, taking care that no gentlemen take 
their places at table till all the ladies, or, as we should 
say in England, the women of every class, are first 
seated. The men, by whom they are accompanied, are 
then invited to join them, after which, at the sound of a 
bell, the bachelors and married men travelling en garcon 
pour into the saloon, in much the same style as mem- 
bers of the House of Commons rush into the Upper 
House to hear a speech from the throne. 

One of the first peculiarities that must strike a for- 
eigner in the United States is the deference paid uni- 
versally to the sex, without regard to station. Women 
may travel alone here in stage-coaches, steam-boats, 
and railways, with less risk of encountering disagree- 
able behaviour, and of hearing coarse and unpleasant 
conversation, than in any country I have ever visited. 
The contrast in this respect between the Americans 
and the French is quite remarkable. There is a spirit 
of true gallantry in all this, but the publicity of the 
railway car, where all are in one long room, and of the 



44 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

large ordinaries, whether on land or water, is a great 
protection, the want of which has been felt by many a 
female traveller without escort in England. As the 
Americans address no conversation to strangers, we 
soon became tolerably reconciled to living so much in 
public. Our fellow-passengers consisted for the most 
part of shopkeepers, artizans, and mechanics, with 
their families, all well-dressed, and so far as we had 
intercourse with them, -polite and desirous to please. 
A large part of them were on pleasure excursions, in 
which they delight to spend their cash. 

On one or two occasions during our late tour in the 
newly-settled districts of New York, it was intimated 
to us that we were expected to sit down to dinner with 
our driver, usually the son or brother of the farmer who 
owned our vehicle. We were invariably struck with the 
propriety of their manners, in which there was self- 
respect without forwardness. The only disagreeable 
adventure in the way of coming into close contact with 
low and coarse companions, arose from my taking 
places in a cheap canal-boat near Lockport, partly 
filled with emigrants, and corresponding somewhat in 
the rank of its passengers with a third-class railway- 
carriage in England. I afterwards learnt that I might 
have hired a good private carriage at the very place 
where I embarked. This convenience indeed, although 
there is no posting, I invariably found at my command 
in all states of the I^nion, both northern and southern, 
which I visited during my stay in America. 

Travellers must make up their minds, in this as in 



LYELUS TRAVELS 45 

other countries, to fall in now and then with free and 
easy people. I am bound, however, to say that in the 
two most glaring instances of vulgar familiarity which 
we have experienced here, we found out that both the 
offenders had crossed the Atlantic only ten years be- 
fore, and had risen rapidly from a humble station. 
Whatever good breeding exists here in the middle 
classes is certainly not of foreign importation; and 
John Bull, in particular, when out of humour with the 
manners of the Americans, is often unconsciously be- 
holding his own image in the mirror, or comparing one 
class of society in the United States with another in his 
own country, which ought, from superior affluence and 
leisure, to exhibit a higher standard of refinement and 
intelligence. 

We have now seen the two largest cities, many towns 
and villages, besides some of the back settlements, of 
New York and the New England States; an exemplifica- 
tion, I am told, of a population amounting to about 
five millions of souls. We have met with no beggars, 
witnessed no signs of want, but everywhere the most 
unequivocal proofs of prosperity and rapid progress in 
agriculture, commerce, and great public works. As 
these states are, some of them, entirely free from debt, 
and the rest have punctually paid the interest of Gov- 
ernment loans, it would be most unjust to apply to 
them the disparaging comment ''that it is easy to go 
ahead with borrowed money." In spite of the constant 
influx of uneducated and penny less adventurers from 
Europe, I believe it would be impossible to find five 



46 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

millions in any other reg;ion of the globe whose average 
moral, social, and intellectual condition stands so high. 
One convincing evidence of their well-being has not, I 
think, been sufficiently dwelt upon by foreigners: 1 
allude to the difficulty of obtaining and retaining young 
American men and women for a series of years in do- 
mestic service, an occupation by no means considered 
as degrading here, for they are highly paid, and treated 
almost as equals. But so long as they enjoy such 
facilities of bettering their condition, and can marry 
early, they will naturally renounce this bondage as 
soon as possible. That the few, or the opulent class, 
especially those resident in country places, should be 
put to great inconvenience by this circumstance, is 
unavoidable, and we must therefore be on our guard, 
when endeavouring to estimate the happiness of the 
many, not to sympathise too much with this minority. 
I am also aware that the blessing alluded to, and 
many others which they enjoy, belong to a progressive, 
as contrasted with a stationary, state of society; — that 
they characterize the new colony, where there is abund- 
ance of unoccupied land, and a ready outlet to a re- 
dundant labouring class. They are not the results of a 
democratic, as compared with a monarchical or aristo- 
cratic constitution, nor the fruits of an absolute equality 
of religious sects, still less of universal suffrage. Never- 
theless, we must not forget how easily all the geographi- 
cal advantages arising from climate, soil, fine navigable 
rivers, splendid harbours, and a wilderness in the far 
West, might have been marred by other laws, and other 



LYELVS TRAVELS 47 

political institutions. Had Spain colonized this region, 
how different would have been her career of civilization! 
Had the puritan fathers landed on the banks of the 
Plata, how many hundreds of large steamers would ere 
this have been plying the Parana and Uruguay, — how 
many railway-trains flying over the Pampas,- — how 
many large schools and universities flourishing in 
Paraguay ! 

Sept. 28. — We next went by railway from New York 
to Philadelphia through the state of New Jersey. 
Large fields of maize, without the stumps of trees aris- 
ing above the corn, and villas with neat flower-gardens, 
seemed a novelty to us after the eye had dwelt for so 
many hundreds of miles on native forests and new 
clearings. The streets of Philadelphia rival the finest 
Dutch towns in cleanliness, and the beautiful avenues 
of various kinds of trees afford a most welcome shade 
in summer. We were five days here, and every night 
there was an alarm of fire, usually a false one; but the 
noise of the firemen was tremendous. At the head of 
the procession came a runner blowing a horn with a 
deep unearthly sound, next a long team of men (for no 
horses are employed) drawing a strong rope to which 
the ponderous engine was attached with a large bell at 
the top, ringing all the way; next followed a mob, some 
with torches, others shouting loudly; and before they 
were half out of hearing, another engine follows with 
a like escort; the whole affair resembling a scene in Der 
Freischutz or Robert le Diable, rather than an act in real 
life. It is, however, no sham, for these 3"0ung men are 



48 LYELVS TRAVELS 

ready to risk their lives in extinguishing a fire; and as 
an apology for their disturbing the peace of the city 
when there was no cause, we were told ''that the youth 
here require excitement!" They manage these matters 
as effectively at Boston without turmoil. 



CHAPTER V 

Wooded Ridges of the Alleghany Mountains — German Patois in 
Pennsylvania — Election of a Governor at Trenton and at Phila- 
delphia — Journey to Boston — Boston the Seat of Commerce, of 
Government, and of a University — Lectures at the Lowell Institute — 
Influence of Oral Instruction in Literature and Science — Blind 
Asylum — Lowell Factory — National Schools — Society in Boston. 

October 7, 1841. — The steep slopes, as well as the 
summits of the ridges in the anthracite region of Penn- 
sylvania, are so densely covered with wood, that the 
surveyors were obliged to climb to the tops of trees, in 
order to obtain general views of the country, and con- 
struct a geographical map on the scale of two inches to 
a mile, on which they laid down the result of their geo- 
logical observations. Under the trees, the ground is 
covered with Rhododendron, Kalmia, and another 
evergreen called Sweet Fern, the leaves of which have 
a very agreeable odour, resembling that of our bog- 
myrtle, but fainter. The leaves are so like those of a 
fern or Pteris in form, that the miners call the impres- 
sions of the fossil Pecopteris, in the coal-shales ''sweet 
fern." 

We found the German language chiefly spoken in this 
mountainous region, and preached in most of the 
churches, as at Reading. It is fast degenerating into a 
patois, and it is amusing to see many Germanized Eng- 

49 



50 LYELVS TRAVELS 

lish words introduced even into the newspapers, such 
as turnpeik for turnpike, /<?nse for fence, flauer for flour, 
or others, such as jail, which have been adopted with- 
out alteration. 

From the Lehigh Summit Mine, we descended for 
nine miles on a railway impelled by our own weight, 
in a small car at the rate of twenty miles an hour. A 
man sat in front checking our speed by a drag on 
the steeper declivities, and oiling the wheels without 
stopping. The coal is let down by the same railroad, 
sixty mules being employed to draw up the empty cars 
every day. In the evening the mules themselves are 
sent down standing four abreast and feeding out of 
mangers the whole way. We saw them start in a long 
train of waggons, and were told, that so completely do 
they acquire the notion that it is their business through 
life to pull weights up hill, and ride down at their ease, 
that if any of them are afterwards taken away from the 
mine and set to other occupations, they willingly drag 
heavy loads up steep ascents, but obstinately refuse to 
pull any vehicle down hill, coming to a dead halt at 
the commencement of the slightest slope. 

The general effect of the long unbroken summits of 
the ridges of the Alleghany Mountains is very monoto- 
nous and unpicturesque; but the scenery is beautiful, 
where we meet occasionally with a transverse gorge 
through which a large river escapes. After visiting the 
Beaver Meadow coal field, we left the mountains by 
one of these openings, called the Lehigh Gap, wooded 
on l)oth sides, and ahnost filled up by tlie Lehigh River, 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 51 

a branch of the Delaware, the banks of which we now 
followed to Trenton in New Jersey. 

On our way, we heard much of a disastrous flood 
which occurred last spring on the melting of the snow, 
and swept away several bridges, causing the loss of 
many lives. I observed the trees on the right bank of 
the Delaware at an elevation of about twenty-four feet 
above the present surface of the river, with their bark 
worn through by the sheets of ice which had been 
driven against them. The canal was entirely filled up 
with gravel and large stones to the level of the towing 
path, twenty feet above the present level of the stream, 
which appeared to me to be only explicable by sup- 
posing the stones to have been frozen and carried by the 
floating ice. 

Oct. 11. — Reaching Trenton, the capital of New 
Jersey, late in the evening, we found the town in all the 
bustle of a general election. A new governor and repre- 
sentatives for the State legislature were to be chosen. 
As parties are nearly balanced, and the suffrage uni- 
versal, the good order maintained was highly creditable. 
Processions, called '^parades," were perambulating the 
streets headed by bands of music, and carrying trans- 
parencies with Hghts in them, in which the names of 
different counties, and mottoes, such as Union, Liberty, 
and Equality, were conspicuously inscribed. Occasion- 
ally a man called out in a stentorian voice, ''The ticket, 
the whole ticket, and nothing but the ticket," which 
was followed by a loud English hurra, while at intervals 
a single blow was struck on a great drum, as if to imi- 



52 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

tate the firing of a gun. On their tickets were printed 
the names of the governor, officers, and members for 
whom the committee of each party had determined to 
vote. 

The next day on our return to Philadelphia, we found 
that city also in the ferment of an election, bands of 
music being placed in open carriages, each drawn by 
four horses, and each horse decorated with a flag, at- 
tached to its shoulder, which has a gay effect. All day 
a great bell tolls at the State House, to remind the 
electors of their duties. It sounded like a funeral; and 
on my inquiring of' a bystander what it meant, one of 
the democratic party answered, ''It is the knell of the 
whigs." In their popular addresses, some candidates 
ask the people whether they will vote for the whigs who 
will lay on new taxes. As it is well known, that such 
taxes must be imposed, if the dividends on the State 
bonds are to be paid, these popular appeals are ominous. 
The rapid fall in the value of State securities shows that 
the public generally have no confidence that the ma- 
jority of the electors will be proof against the insidious 
arts of these demagogues. 

Oct. 14. — We came from Philadelphia to Boston, 
300 miles, without fatigue in twenty-four hours, by 
railway and steam-boat, having spent three hours in 
an hotel at New York, and sleeping soundly for six 
hours in the cabin of a commodious steamer as we 
passed through Long Island Sound. The economy of 
time in travelling here is truly admirable. On getting 
out of the cars in the morning, we were ushered into a 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 53 

spacious saloon, where with 200 others we sat down to 
breakfast, and learnt with surprise, that while thus 
agreeably employed, we had been carried rapidly in a 
large ferry-boat without perceiving any motion across 
a broad estuary to Providence in the State of Rhode 
Island. 

Many trees in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massa- 
chusetts, have now begun to assume their autumnal 
tints, especially the maples, while the oaks retain their 
vivid green colour. I can only compare the brightness 
of the faded leaves, scarlet, purple, and yellow, to that 
of tulips. It is now the Indian summer, a season of 
warm sunny weather, which often succeeds to the first 
frost and rain, a time which the Indians employed in 
hunting and laying up a store of game for the winter. 

Boston, Oct. 14, to Dec. 3, 1841. — It is fortunate 
that Boston is at once a flourishing commercial port, 
and the seat of the best endowed university in America, 
for Cambridge, where Harvard College is situated, is so 
near, that it may be considered as a suburb of the 
metropolis. The medical lectures, indeed, are de- 
livered in the city, where the great hospitals are at 
hand. The mingling of the professors, both literary 
and scientific, with the eminent lawyers, clergymen, 
physicians, and principal merchants of the place, forms 
a society of a superior kind; and to these may be added 
several persons, who, having inherited ample fortunes, 
have successfully devoted their lives to original re- 
searches in history, and other departments. It is also a 
political advantage of no small moment that the legis- 



54 LYELVS TRAVELS 

lature assembles here, as its members, consisting In 
great part of small proprietors farming their own land, 
are thus brought into contact with a community in a 
very advanced state of civilization, so that they are 
under the immediate check of an enlightened public 
opinion. It is far more usual to place the capital, as it is 
called, in the centre of the State, often in some small 
village or town of no importance, and selected from 
mere geographical considerations, which might well be 
disregarded in a country enjoying such locomotive fa- 
cilities. An immense sacrifice is then required from 
those men of independent fortune, who, for patriotic 
motives, must leave the best society of a large city, to 
spend the winter in some remote spot in the discharge 
of public duties. 

I had been invited when in England by Mr. Lowell, 
trustee and director of a richly endowed literary and 
scientific institution in this city, to deliver a course of 
twelve lectures on geology during the present autumn. 
According to the conditions of the bequest, the public 
have gratuitous admission to these lectures; but by 
several judicious restrictions, such as requiring ap- 
plications for tickets to be made some weeks before, 
and compliance with other rules, the trustee has obvi- 
ated much of the inconvenience arising from this privi- 
lege, for it is well known that a class which pays noth- 
ing is irregular and careless in its attendance. As the 
number of tickets granted for my lectures amounted 
to 4500, and the class usually attending consisted of 
more than 3000 persons, it was necessary to divide 



LYELUS travel;^ 55 

them into two sets, and repeat to one of them the next 
afternoon the lecture delivered on the previous evening. 
It is by no means uncommon for professors who have 
not the attraction of novelty, or the advantage which I 
happened to enjoy, of coming from a great distance, 
to command audiences in this institution as numerous 
as that above alluded to. The subjects of their dis- 
courses are various, such as natural history, chemistry, 
the fine arts, natural theology, and many others. 
Among my hearers were persons of both sexes, of every 
station in society, from the most affluent and eminent 
in the various learned professions to the humblest 
mechanics, all well dressed and observing the utmost 
decorum. 

The theatres ^ were never in high favour here, and 
most of them have been turned to various secular and 
ecclesiastical uses, and among others into lecture rooms, 
to which many of the public resort for amusement as 
they might formerly have done to a play, after the 
labours of the day are over. If the selection of teachers 
be in good hands, institutions of this kind cannot fail 
to exert a powerful influence in improving the taste and 
intellectual condition of the people, especially where 
college is quitted at an early age for the business of 
active life, and where there is always danger in a com- 
mercial community that the desire of money-making 
may be carried to excess. It is, moreover, peculiarly 
desirable in a democratic state, where the public mind 
is apt to be exclusively absorbed in politics, and in a 
country where the free competition of rival sects has a 



56 LYELUS TRAVELS 

tendency to produce not indifferentism, as some at 
home may be disposed to think, but too much excite- 
ment in religious matters. 

We are informed by Mr. Everett, late governor of 
Massachusetts (since minister -of the U. S. in England), 
that before the existence of the Lowell Foundation, 
twenty-six courses of lectures were delivered in Boston, 
without including those which consisted of less than 
eight lectures, and these courses were attended in the 
aggregate by about 13,500 persons. But notwithstand- 
ing the popularity of this form of instruction, the 
means of the literary and scientific institutions of the 
city were w^holly inadequate to hold out a liberal and 
certain reward to men of talent and learning. There 
were some few instances of continuous courses de- 
livered by men of eminence; but the task more com- 
monly devolved upon individuals who cultivated the 
art of speaking merely to become the vehicles of second- 
hand information, and who were not entitled to speak 
with authority, and from the fulness of their own 
knowledge. 

The rich who have had a liberal education, who 
know how to select the best books, and can afford to 
purchase them, w^ho can retreat into the quiet of their 
libraries from the noise of their children, and, if they 
please, obtain the aid of private tuition, may doubt 
the utility of public lectures on the fine arts, history, 
and the physical sciences. But oral instruction is, in 
fact, the only means by which the great mass of the 
middling and lower classes can have their thoughts 



LYELUS TRAVELS 57 

turned to these Subjects, and it is the fault of the higher 
classes if the information they receive be unsound, and 
if the business of the teacher be not held in high hon- 
our. The whole body of the clergy in every country 
and, under popular forms of government, the leading 
politicians have been in all ages convinced that they 
must avail themselves of this method of teaching, if 
they would influence both high and low. No theolog- 
ical dogma is so abstruse, no doctrine of political 
economy or legislative science so difficult, as to be 
deemed unfit to be preached from the pulpit, or incul- 
cated on the hustings. The invention of printing, 
followed by the rapid and -general dispersion of the 
cheap daily newspaper, or the religious tract, have been 
by no means permitted to supersede the instrumental- 
ity of oral teaching, and the powerful sympathy and 
excitement created by congregated numbers. If the 
leading patrons and 'cultivators of literature and phys- 
ical science neglect this ready and efficacious means of 
interesting the multitude in their pursuits, they are 
wanting to themselves, and have no right to complain 
of the apathy or indifference of the public. 

To obtain the services of eminent men engaged in 
original researches, for the delivery of systematic 
courses of lectures, is impossible without the command 
of much larger funds than are usually devoted to this 
object. When it is stated that the fees at the Lowell 
Institute at Boston are on a scale more than three 
times higher than the remuneration awarded to the 
best literary and scientific public lecturers in London, 



58 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

it will at first be thought hopeless to endeavour to carry 
similar plans into execution in other large cities, 
whether at home or in the United States. In reality, 
however, the sum bequeathed by the late Mr. John 
Lowell for his foundation, though munificent, w^as by 
no means enormous,' not exceeding much 70,000£., 
w^hich, according to the usual fate awaiting donations 
for educational objects, would have been all swallowed 
up in the erection of costly buildings, after which the 
learned would be invited to share the scanty leavings 
of the ''Committee of Taste," and the merciless archi- 
tect, ''reliquias Danaum atque inmitis Achillei." ^ But 
in the present case, the testator provided in his will 
that not a single dollar should be spent in l^rick and 
mortar, in consequence of which proviso, a spacious 
room was at once hired, and the intentions of the donor 
carried immediately into effect, without a year's delay. 
Mr. John Lowell, a native of Massachusetts, after 
having carefully studied the educational establishments 
of his own country, visited London in 1833, and hav- 
ing sojourned there some months, paying a visit to 
the University of Cambridge and other places, he 
pursued his travels in the hope of exploring India and 
China. On his way he passed through Egypt, where, 
being attacked, while engaged in making a collection 
of antiques, by an intermittent fever, of which he 
soon afterwards died, he drew up his last will in 1835, 
amidst the ruins of Thebes, leaving half of his noble 
fortune for the foundation of a Literary Institute in 
his native city. 



LYELVS TRAVELS 59 

In the Blind Asylum I saw Laura Bridgman, now in 
her twelfth year. At the age of two she lost her sight 
and hearing by a severe illness, but although deaf, 
dumb, and blind, her mind has been so advanced by 
the method of instruction pursued by Dr. Howe, that 
she shows more intelligence and quickness of feeling 
than many girls of the same age who are in full posses- 
sion of all their senses. The excellent reports of Dr. 
Howe, on the gradual development of her mind, have 
been long before the public, and have recently been 
cited by Mr. Dickens, together with some judicious 
observations of his own. Perhaps no one of the cases 
of a somewhat analogous nature, on which Dugald 
Stewart and others have philosophised, has furnished 
so many new and valuable facts illustrating the ex- 
tent to which all intellectual development is depend- 
ent on the instrumentality of the senses in discerning 
external objects, and, at the same time, in how small 
a degree the relative acuteness of the organs of sense 
determine the moral and intellectual superiority of the 
individual. 

Nov. 15. — Went twenty-six miles to the north of 
Boston, by an excellent railway, to the manufacturing 
town of Lowell, which has sprung up entirely in the 
last sixteen years, and now contains about 20,000 
inhabitants. The mills are remarkably clean, and 
well warmed, and almost all for making cotton and 
woolen goods, which are exported to the West. The 
young women from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, 
who attend to the spinning-wheels, are good-looking 



60 LYELUS TRAVELS 

and neatly dressed, chiefly the daughters of New 
England farmers, sometimes of the poorer clergy. 
They belong, therefore, to a very different class from 
our manufacturing population, and after remaining 
a few years in the factory, return to their homes, and 
usually marry. We are told that, to work in these 
factories is considered far more eligible for a young 
woman than domestic service, as they can save more, 
and have stated hours of work (twelve hours a day!), 
after which they are at liberty. Their moral charac- 
ter stands very high, and a girl is paid off, if the least 
doubt exists on that point. Boarding-houses, usually 
kept by widows, are attached to each mill, in which 
the operatives are required to board; the men and 
women being separate. This regard for the welfare 
and conduct of the work-people when they are not 
on actual duty is comparatively rare in England, 
where the greater supply of labour would render such 
interference and kind superintendence much more prac- 
ticable. Still we could not expect that the results 
would be equally satisfactory with us, on account of 
the lower grade of the operatives, and the ignorance 
of the lower classes in England. In regard to the 
order, dress, and cleanliness of the people, these merits 
are also exemplified in the rural districts of Lancashire, 
and it is usually in our large towns alone, that the work- 
people are unhealthy and squalid, especially where a 
number of the poor live crowded together in bad dwell- 
ings. 

The factories at Lowell are not only on a great scale, 



LYELUS TRAVELS 61 

but they have been so managed as to yield high profits, 
a fact which should be impressed on the mind of every 
foreigner who visits them, lest, after admiring the 
gentility of manner and dress of the women and men 
employed, he should go away with the idea that he had 
been seeing a model mill, or a set of gentlemen and 
ladies playing at factory for their amusement. There 
are few children employed, and those under fifteen are 
compelled by law to go to school three months in the 
year, under penalty of a heavy fine. If this regula- 
tion is infringed, informers are not wanting, for there 
is a strong sympathy in the public mind with all acts 
of the legislature, enforcing education. The Bostonians 
submit to pay annually for public instruction in their 
city alone, the sum of 30,000/. sterling, which is about 
equal to the parliamentary grant of this year (1841) 
for the whole of England, while the sum raised for 
free schools in this state this year, by taxes for wages 
of teachers, and their board, and exclusive of funds 
for building, exceeds 100,000/. sterling. 

The law ordains, that every district containing fifty 
families shall maintain one school, for the support of 
which the inhabitants are required to tax themselves, 
and to appoint committees annually for managing the 
funds, and choosing their own schoolmasters. The 
Bible is allowed to be read in all, and is actually read 
in nearly all the schools; but the law prohibits the use 
of books ''calculated to favour the tenets of any par- 
ticular sect of Christians." Parents and guardians are 
expected to teach their own children, or to procure 



62 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

them to be taught, what. they believe to be religious 
truth, and for this purpose, besides family worship 
and the pulpit, there are Sunday-schools. The system 
works well among this church-building and church- 
going population. 

As there is no other region in Anglo-saxondom, con- 
taining 750,000 souls, where national education has 
been carried so far, it is important to enquire to what 
combination of causes its success is mainly to be at- 
tributed. First, there is no class in want or extreme 
poverty here, partly because the facility of migrating 
to the west, for those who are without employment, is 
so great, and also, in part, from the check to improvi- 
dent marriages, created by the high standard of liv- 
ing to which the lowest work-people aspire, a standard 
which education is raising higher and higher from day 
to day. Secondly, I have often heard politicians of 
opposite parties declare, that there is no safety for the 
republic, now that the electoral suffrage has been so 
much extended, unless every exertion is made to raise 
the moral and intellectual condition of the masses. 
The fears entertained l)y the rich of the dangers of 
ignorance, is the only good result which I could dis- 
cover tending to counterbalance the enormous pre- 
ponderance of evil arising in the United States from 
so near an approach to universal suffrage. Thirdly, 
the political and social equality of all religious sects, — 
a blessing which the New Englanders do not owe to 
the American revolution, for it was fully recognised 
and enjoyed under the supremacy of the British crown. 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 63 

This equality tends to remove the greatest stumbling 
block, still standing in the way of national instruction 
in Great Britain, where we allow one generation after 
another of the lower classes to grow up without being 
taught good morals, good behaviour, and the knowl- 
edge of things useful and ornamental, because we 
cannot all agree as to the precise theological doctrines 
in which they are to be brought up. Politically, all 
sects in Massachusetts are ready to unite against the 
encroachments of any other, and a great degree of 
religious freedom is enjoyed, in consequence of there 
being no sect to which it is ungenteel to belong, no 
consciences sorely tempted by ambition to conform 
to a more fashionable creed. 

The twenty-fifth of November was appointed by 
the Governor of the State to be what is here called 
Thanksgiving-Day, an institution as old as the times 
of the Pilgrim Fathers, one day in the year being' set 
apart for thanksgiving for the mercies of the past year. 
As a festival it stands very much in the place of Christ- 
mas Day as kept in England and Germany, being 
always in winter, and every body going to church in 
the morning and meeting in large family parties in the 
evening. To one of these we were most kindly wel- 
comed; and the reception which we met with here and 
in the few families to which we had letters of intro- 
duction, m.ade us entirely forget that we were foreigners. 
Several of our new acquaintances indeed had travelled 
in England and on the Continent, and were in constant 
correspondence with our own literary and scientific 



64 LYELUS TRAVELS 

friends, so that we were always hearing from them 
some personal news of those with whom we were most 
intimate in Europe, and we often reflected with sur- 
prise in how many parts of England we should have 
felt less at home. 

I remember an eminent English writer once saying to 
me, when he had just read a recently-published book 
on the United States, ''I wonder the author went so 
far to see disagreeable people, when there are so many 
of them at home." It would certainly be strange if 
persons of refined habits, even without being fastidi- 
ous, who travel to see life, and think it their duty, 
with a view of studying character, to associate indis- 
criminately with all kinds of people, visiting the fii*st 
strangers who ask them to their houses, and choosing 
their companions without reference to congeniality of 
taste, pursuits, manners, or opinions, did not find so- 
ciety in their own or any other country in the world 
intolerable. 



CHAPTER VI 

Fall of Snow and Sleigh-driving at Boston — Journey to New 
Haven — Income of Farmers — Baltimore — Washington — Natural 
Impediments to the Growth of Washington — Why chosen for the 
Capital — Richmond. 

.■ Nov. 29, 1841. — Although we were in the latitude 
of Rome, and there were no mountains near us, we had 
a heavy fall of snow at Boston this day, followed by 
bright sunshine and hard frost. It was a cheerful 
scene to see the sleighs gliding noiselessly about the 
streets, and to hear the bells, tied to the horses' heads, 
warning the passer-by of their swift approach. As 
it was now the best season to geologise in the southern 
States, I determined to make a flight in that direction; 
and we had gone no farther than New Haven before 
we found that all the snow had disappeared. I accord- 
ingly took the opportunity when there of making a 
geological excursion, with Mr. Silliman, jun., Profes- 
sor Hubbard, and Mr. Whelpley, to examine the red 
sandstone strata by the side of a small waterfall, one 
mile from Durham, in Connecticut. 

In the neighborhood of Durham we learnt that a 
snowstorm, which occurred there in the first week of 
October, had seriously injured the woods, weighing 
down the boughs then in full leaf, and snapping off 

65 



66 LYELVS TRAVELS 

the leading shoots. For the first time in the United 
States I heard great concern expressed for the damage 
sustained by the timber, which is beginning to grow 
scarce in New England, where coal is dear. 

The valley of the Connecticut presents a pleasing 
picture of a rural population, where there is neither 
poverty nor great wealth. 1 was told by well-informed 
persons, that if the land and stock of the farmers or 
small proprietors were sold off and invested in securi- 
ties giving six per cent interest, their average incomes 
would not exceed more than from 80£ to 120£ a year. 
An old gentleman who lately revisited Durham, his 
native place, after an absence of twenty-five years, 
told me that in this interval the large families, the 
equal subdivision of the paternal estates among chil- 
dren, and the efforts made for the outfit of sons mi- 
grating to the West, had sensibly lowered the fortunes 
of the Connecticut yeomanry, so that they were re- 
duced nearer to the condition of labourers than when 
he left them. 

Pursuing my course southwards, I found that the 
snowstorm had been less heavy at New York, still 
less at Philadelphia, and after crossing the Susque- 
hanna (Dec. 13) the weather began to resemble that 
of an English spring. In the sul)url)s of Baltimore, 
the locomotive engines being detached, our cars were 
drawn by horses on a railway into the middle of the 
town. Maryland was the first slave state we had 
visited; and at Baltimore we were reminded for the 
first time of the poorer inhabitants of a large European 



LYELUS TRAVELS 67 

city by the mean dwellings and dress of some of the 
labouring class, both coloured and white. 

At Washington I was shown the newly-founded 
national museum, in which the objects of natural his- 
tory and other treasures collected during the late voy- 
age of discovery to the Antarctic regions, the South 
Seas, and California, are deposited. Such a national 
repository w^ould be invaluable at Philadelphia, New 
York, or Boston, but here there is no university, 
no classes of students in science or literature, no 
philosophical societies, no people who seem to have 
any leisure. The members of Congress rarely have 
town residences in this place, but, leaving their families 
in large cities, where they may enjoy more refined 
society, they live here in boarding-houses until their 
political duties and the session are over. If the most 
eminent legislators and statesmen, the lawyers of the 
supreme courts, and the foreign ambassadors, had 
all been assembled here for a great part of the year 
wath their families, in a wealthy and flourishing me- 
tropolis, the social and political results of a great centre 
of influence and authority could not have failed to be 
most beneficial. Circumstances purely accidental, and 
not the intentional jealousy of the democracy, have 
checked the growth of the capital, and deprived it of 
the constitutional ascendency wdiich it might other- 
wise have exerted. Congress first assembled in Phila- 
delphia, where the declaration of independence was 
signed; but after the close of the revolutionary war in 
June, 1783, a party of the disbanded army marched 



68 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

to that city to demand their arrears of pay, surround- 
ing the l^uilding in which the representatives of the 
people were sitting, with fixed bayonets for about 
three hours. This alarm caused them to adjourn and 
meet at Princeton, New Jersey, and afterwards to seek 
some permanent seat of government. But for this 
untoward event, Philadelphia might have remained 
the federal metropolis, and in that case w^ould cer- 
tainly have lifted up her head above other cities in the 
New World— 

"Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupres-si." i 

General Washington is said to have selected the 
present site of the capital as the most central spot 
on the Atlantic border, being midway between Maine 
and Florida, and being also at the head of the naviga- 
tion of a great river. He had observed that all the 
other principal cities eastward of the Alleghany moun- 
tains had sprung up on similar sites; but unfortunately 
the estuary of the Potomac is so long and winding, that 
to ascend from its mouth to Washington is said often 
to take a vessel as long as to cross from Liverpool to 
tli£ mouth of the river. Had Annapolis, which is only 
thirty miles distant, been chosen as the capital, it is 
believed that it would, ere this, have contained 100,000 
inhabitants. 

We were present at an animated debate in the House 
of Representatives, on the proposed protective tariff, 
and a discussion in the senate on " Ways and Means," 
both carried on with great order and decorum. After 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 60 

being presented to the President, and visiting several 
persons to whom we had letters, we were warned by a 
slight sprinkling of snow that it was time to depart 
and migrate further southwards. Crossing the Poto- 
mac, therefore, I proceeded to Richmond, in Virginia, 
where I resolved to sail down the James River, in order 
to examine the geology of the tertiary strata on its 
shores. 

On entering the station-house of the railway which 
was to carry us to our place of embarkation, we found 
a room with only two chairs in it. One of these was 
occupied by a respectable-looking woman, Avho im- 
mediately rose, intending to give it up to me, an act 
betraying that she was English, and newly-arrived, as 
an American gentleman, even if already seated, would 
have felt it necessary to rise and offer the chair to 
any woman, whether mistress or maid, and she, as a 
matter of course, would have accepted the proffered 
seat. After I had gone out, she told my wife that she 
and her husband had come a few months before from 
Hertfordshire, hoping to get work in Virginia, but she 
had discovered that there was no room here for poor 
white people, who were despised by the very negroes 
if they laboured with their own hands. She had found 
herself looked down upon, even for carrying her own 
child, for they said she ought to hire a black nurse. 
These poor emigrants were now anxious to settle in 
some free state. 

As another exemplification of the impediments to 
improvement existing here, I was told that a New Eng- 



?0 LYELVS TRAVELS 

land agriculturalist had bought a farm on the south 
side of the James river, sold off all the slaves, and in- 
troduced Irish labourers, being persuaded that their 
services would prove more economical than slave- 
labour. The scheme was answering well, till, by the 
end of the third year, the Irish became very much dis- 
satisfied with their position, feeling degraded by losing 
the respect of the whites, and being exposed to the con- 
tempt of the surrounding negroes. They had, in fact, 
lowered themselves by the habitual performance of of- 
fices which, south of the Potomac, are assigned to 
hereditary bondsmen. 

All the planters in this part of Virginia, to whose 
houses I went without letters of introduction, received 
me politely and hospitably. To be an Englishman en- 
gaged in scientific pursuits was a sufficient passport, 
and their servants, horses, and carriages, were most 
liberally placed at my disposal. 

I crossed to the north side of the James river, being 
rowed out at sunrise far from the shore to wait for a 
steamer. The hour of her arrival being somewhat un- 
certain, we remained for some time in the cold, mufl^ed 
up in our cloaks, in a small boat moored to a single 
wooden pile driven into a shoal, with three negroes for 
our companions. The situation was desolate in the ex- 
treme, both the banks of the broad estuary appearing 
low and distant, and as wild and uninhabited as when 
first discovered in 1607, by Captain Smith, before he 
was taken prisoner, and his life saved by the Indian 
maiden Pocahontas. At length we gladly hailed the 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 71 

large steamer as she came down rapidly towards us, 
and my luggage was immediately taken charge of by 
two of the sable crew. 

We disembarked in a few hours near the old deserted 
village of Jamestown, at the Grove Landing, seven 
miles south of Williamsburg. We then visited Wil- 
liamsburg, where there is a University founded by Wil- 
liam and Mary, and therefore very ancient for this 
country. 



CHAPTER VII 

Pine Barrens of Virginia and North Carolina — Railway Train 
stopped by Snow and Ice — The Great Dismal Swamp — Soil formed 
entirely of Vegetable Matter — Rises higher than the contiguous firm 
Land — Buried Timber — Lake in the Middle. 

Dec. 23, 1841. — From Williamsburg we went to Nor- 
folk in Virginia, passing down the James river in a 
steamer, and from Norfolk by railway to Weldon in 
North Carolina, passing for eighty miles through a low 
level country, covered with fir trees, and called the Pine 
Barrens. On our way we were overtaken by rain, which 
turned to sleet, and in the evening formed a coating of 
ice on the rails, so that the wheels of the engine could 
not take hold. There was a good stove and plenty of 
fuel in the car, but no food. After a short pause, the 
engineer backed the locomotive for half a mile over that 
part of the rail from which the snow and ice had just 
been brushed and scraped away by the passage of the 
train; then, returning rapidly, he gained sufficient mo- 
mentum to carry us on two or three miles farther, and, 
by several repetitions of this manoeuvre, he brought us, 
about nightfall, to a small watering station, where there 
was no inn, but a two-storied cottage not far off. 

Here we were made welcome, and as we had pre- 
viously dropped by the way all of our passengers ex- 

72 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 73 

cept two, were furnished with a small room to ourselves, 
and a clean comfortable bed. We soon made a blazing 
wood-fire, and defied the cold, although we could see 
plainly the white snow on the ground through openings 
in the unplastered laths of which the walls of the house 
were made. Before morning all the snow was melted, 
and we again proceeded on our way through the Pine 
Barrens. 

Our car, according to the usual construction in this 
country, was in the shape of a long omnibus, with the 
seats transverse, and a passage down the middle, where, 
to the great relief of the traveller, he can stand upright 
with his hat on, and walk about, warming himself when 
he pleases at the stove, which is in the centre of the 
car. There is often a private room fitted up for the 
ladies, into which no gentleman can intrude, and where 
they are sometimes supplied with rocking-chairs, so 
essential to the comfort of the Americans, whether at 
sea or on land, in a fashionable drawing-room or in the 
cabin of a ship. It is singular enough that this luxury, 
after being popular for ages all over Lancashire, re- 
quired transplantation to the New World before it 
could be improved and become fashionable, so as to 
be reimported into its native land. 

The Pine Barrens, on which the long-leafed or pitch 
pines flourish, have for the most part a siliceous soil, 
and form a broad belt many hundred miles in length, 
running parallel to the coast, in the region called the 
Atlantic Plain, before alluded to. The sands cause 
swamps where peculiar kinds of evergreen oaks, the 



74 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

cypress or cedar, tall canes and other plants abound. 
Many climbers called here wild vines, encircle the trunks 
of the trees, and on tKe banks of the Roanoke, near 
Weldon, I saw numerous missletoes with their white 
berries. The Pine Barrens retain much of their verdure 
in winter, and were interesting to me from the uniform- 
ity and monotony of their general aspect, for they con- 
stitute, from their vast extent, one of the marked fea- 
tures in the geography of the globe, like the Pampas of 
South America. 

There are many swamps or morasses in this low flat 
region, and one of the largest of these occurs between 
the towns of Norfolk and Weldon. We traversed sev- 
eral miles of its northern extremity on the railway, 
which is supported on piles. It bears the appropriate 
and very expressive name of the ''Great Dismal," and 
is no less than forty miles in length from north to south, 
and twenty-five miles in its greatest width from east 
to west, the northern half being situated in Virginia, 
the southern in North Carolina. I observed that the 
water was obviously in motion in several places, and 
the morass has somewhat the appearance of a broad 
inundated river-plain, covered with all kinds of aquatic 
trees and shrubs, the soil being as black as in a peat- 
bog. 

It is one enormous quagmire, soft and muddy, ex- 
cept where the surface is rendered partially firm by a 
covering of vegetables, and their matted roots; yet, 
strange to say, instead of being lower than the level of 
the surrounding country, it is actually higher than 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 75 

nearly all the firm and dry land which encompasses it, 
and, to make the anomaly complete, in spite of its 
semi-fluid character, it is higher in the interior than 
towards its margin. 

The only exceptions to both these statements is found 
on the western side, where, for instance, for the distance 
of about twelve or fifteen miles, the streams flow from 
slightly elevated but higher land, and supply all its 
abundant and overflowing water. Towards the north, 
the east, and the south, the waters flow from the swamp 
to different rivers, which give abundant evidence, by 
the rate of descent, that the Great Dismal is higher than 
the surrounding firm ground. This fact is also con- 
firmed by the measurements made in levelling for the 
railway from Portsmouth to Suffolk, and for two canals 
cut through different parts of the morass, for the sake 
of obtaining the timber. The railway itself, when trav- 
ersing the Great Dismal, is literally higher than when 
on the land some miles distant on either side, and is six 
to seven feet higher than where it passes over dry 
ground, near to Suffolk and Portsmouth. Upon the 
w^hole the centre of the morass seems to lie more than 
twelve feet above the flat country round it. The soil 
of the swamp is formed of vegetable matter, usually 
without any admixture of earthy particles. We have 
here, in fact, a deposit of peat from ten to fifteen feet 
in thickness, in a latitude where, owing to the heat of 
the sun, and the length of the summer, no peat mosses 
like those of Europe would be looked for under ordinary 
circumstances. 



76 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

In countries like Scotland and Ireland, where the 
climate is damp, and the summer short and cool, the 
natural vegetation of one year does not rot away dur- 
ing the next in moist situations. If water flows into 
such land, it is absorbed, and promotes the vigorous 
growth of mosses and other aquatic plants, and when 
they die, the same water arrests their putrefaction. 
But as a general rule, no such accumulation of peat can 
take place in a country like that of Virginia, where the 
summer's heat causes annually as great a quantity of 
dead plants to decay as is equal in amount to the vege- 
table matter produced in one year. 

It has already been stated that there are many trees 
and shrubs in the region of the Pine Barrens (and the 
same may be said of the United States generally), 
which, like our willows, flourish luxuriously in water. 
The juniper trees, or white cedar, stand firmly in the 
softest parts of the quagmire, supported by their long 
tap roots, and afford, with many other evergreens, a 
dark shade, under which a multitude of ferns, reeds, 
and shrubs, from nine to eighteen feet high, and a thick 
carpet of mosses, four or five inches high, spring up and 
are protected from the rays of the sun. When these 
are most powerful, the large cedar and many other de- 
ciduous trees are in full leaf. The black soil formed be- 
neath this shade, to which the mosses and leaves make 
annual additions, does not perfectly resemble the peat 
of Europe, most of the plants being so decayed as to 
leave little more than soft black mud, without any 
traces of organization. This loose soil is called sponge 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 77 

by the labourers; and it has been ascertained that, when 
exposed to the sun, and thrown out on the banks of 
the canal, where clearings have been made, it rots en- 
tirely away. Hence it is evident that it owes its preser- 
vation in the swamp to moisture and the shade of the 
dense foliage. The evaporation continually going on 
in the wet spongy soil during summer cools the air, and 
generates a temperature resembling that of a northern 
climate, or a region more elevated above the level of 
the sea. 

Numerous trunks of large and tall trees lie buried in 
the black mire of the morass. In so loose a soil they 
are easily overthrown by winds, and nearly as many 
have been found lying beneath the surface of the peaty 
soil, as standing erect upon it. When thrown down, 
they are covered by water, and keeping wet they never 
decompose, except the sap wood, which is less than an 
inch thick. Much of the timber is obtained by sound- 
ing a foot or two below the surface, and it is sawn into 
planks while half under water. 

The bears inhabiting the swamp climb trees in search 
of acorns and gum berries, breaking off large boughs of 
the oaks in order to draw the acorns near to them. 
These same bears are said to kill hogs and even cows. 
There are also wild cats, and occasionally a solitary 
wolf, in the morass. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Tour to Charleston, South Carolina — Facilities of Locomotion — 
Augusta — Voyage down the Savannah River — Fever and Ague — 
Pine Forests of Georgia — Alligators and Land-Tortoises — 
Warmth of Climate in January — Passports required of Slaves. 

Dec. 28. — Charleston, South Carolina. We arrived 
here after a journey of 160 miles through the pine 
forests of North Carolina, between Weldon and Wil- 
mington, and a voyage of about 17 hours, in a steam 
ship, chiefly in the night between Wilmington and this 
place. Here we find ourselves in a genial climate, where 
the snow is rarely seen, and never lies above an hour 
or two upon the ground. The rose, the narcissus, and 
other flowers, are still lingering in the gardens, the 
woods still verdant with the magnolia, live oak, and 
long-leaved pine, while the dwarf fan palm or palmetto, 
frequent among the underwood, marks a more southern 
region. In less than four weeks since we left Boston, we 
have passed from the 43d to the 33d degree of latitude, 
carried often by the power of steam for several hundred 
miles together through thinly peopled wildernesses, yet 
sleeping every night in good inns, and contrasting the 
facilities of locomotion in this new country with the 
difficulties we had contended with the year before when 

78 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 79 

travelling in Europe, through populous parts of Tou- 
raine, Brittany, and other provinces of France. 

At Charleston I made acquaintance with several per- 
sons zealously engaged in the study of Natural History, 
and then went by an excellent railway 136 miles through 
the endless pine woods to Augusta, in Georgia. This 
journey, which would formerly have taken a week, was 
accomplished between sunrise and sunset, and, as we 
scarcely saw by the way any town or village, or even 
a clearing, nor any human habitation except the sta- 
tion houses, the spirit of enterprise displayed in such 
public works filled me with astonishment which in- 
creased the farther I went South. Starting from the 
sea-side, and imagining that we had been on a level the 
whole way, we were surprised to find in the evening, on 
reaching the village of Aiken, sixteen miles from Au- 
gusta, that we were on a height several hundred feet 
above the sea, and that we had to descend a steep in- 
clined plane to the valley of the Savannah river. 

I had been warned by my scientific friends in the 
North that the hospitality of the planters might greatly 
interfere with my schemes of geologizing in the Southern 
states. In the letters, therefore, of introduction fur- 
nished to me at Washington, it was particularly re- 
quested that information respecting my objects, and 
facilities of moving speedily from place to place, should 
be given me, instead of dinners and society. These in- 
junctions were every where kindly and politely com- 
plied with. It was my intention, for the sake of getting 
a correct notion of the low country between the granitic 



80 LYELUS TRAVELS 

region and the Atlantic, to examine the cliffs bounding 
the Savannah river from its rapids to near its mouth, a 
distance, including its windings, of about 250 miles. 
After passing a few days at Augusta, where, for the 
first time, I saw cotton growing in the fields, I embarked 
in a steam-boat employed in the cotton trade, and went 
for forty miles down the great river, which usually 
flows in a broad alluvial plain, with an average fall of 
about one foot per mile, or 250 feet between Augusta 
and the sea. Like the Mississippi and all large rivers, 
which, in flood season, are densely charged with sedi- 
ment, the Savannah has its immediate banks higher 
than the plain intervening between them and the high 
grounds beyond, which usually, however distant from 
the river, present a steep cliff or ''bluff" towards it. 
The low flat alluvial plain, overflowed in great part at 
this rainy season, is covered with aquatic trees, and an 
ornamental growth of tall canes, some of them reaching 
a height of twenty feet, being from one to two inches 
in diameter, and with their leaves still green. The 
lofty cedar, now leafless, towers them, and is remarkable 
for the angular bends of the top boughs, and the large 
thick roots which swell out near the base. 

I landed first at a cliff about 120 feet high, called 
Shell Bluff, from the large fossil oysters which are 
conspicuous there. About forty miles below Augusta, 
at Demery's Ferry, the place where we disembarked, 
the waters were so high that we were carried on shore 
by two stout negroes. In the absence of the proprietor 
to whom I had letters, we were hospitably received by 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 81 

his overseer, who came down to the river bank, with 
two led horses, on one of which was a lady's saddle. 
He conducted us through a beautiful wood, where the 
verdure of the evergreen oaks, the pines, and hollies, 
and the mildness of the air, made it difficult for us to 
believe that it was mid-winter, and that we had been 
the month before in a region of snow storms and 
sledges. We crossed two creeks, and after riding sev- 
eral miles reached the house, and were shown into a spa- 
cious room, where a great wood fire was kept up con- 
stantly on the hearth, and the doors on both sides left 
open day and night. 

Returning home to this hospitable mansion in the 
dusk of the evening of the day following, I was sur- 
prised to see, in a grove of trees near the court-yard 
of the farm, a large wood-fire blazing on the ground. 
Over the fire hung three cauldrons, filled, as I after- 
wards learned, with hog's lard, and three old negro 
women, in their usual drab-coloured costume, were 
leaning over the cauldrons, and stirring the lard to 
clarify it. The red glare of the fire was reflected from 
their faces, and I need hardly say how much they re- 
minded me of the scene of the witches in Macbeth. 
Beside them, moving slowly backwards and forwards 
in a rocking-chair, sat the wife of the overseer, muffled 
up in a cloak, and suffering from a severe cold, but 
obliged to watch the old slaves, who are as thoughtless 
as children, and might spoil the lard if she turned 
away her head for a few minutes. When I inquired 
the meaning of this ceremony I was told it was " killing 



82 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

time," this being the coldest season of the year, and 
that since I left the farm in the morning thirty hogs 
had been sacrificed by the side of a running stream not 
far off. These were destined to serve as winter pro- 
visions for the negroes, of whom there were about a 
hundred on this plantation. To supply all of them with 
food, clothes, and medical attendants, young, old, and 
impotent, as well as the able-bodied, is but a portion 
of the expense of slave-labour. They must be con- 
tinually superintended by trustworthy whites, who 
might often perform no small part of the task, and 
far more effectively, with their own hands. 

Resuming our voyage, thirty miles down the river, 
in another large cotton steam-boat, we were landed 
at Stony Bluff, in Georgia, where I wished to examine 
the rocks of l)urr-stone. There was no living being or 
habitation in sight. The large steamer vanished in an 
instant, sweeping down the swollen river at the rate 
of seventeen miles an hour, and it seemed as if we had 
been dropped down from a balloon, with our luggage, 
in the midst of a wilderness. After making a collection 
of specimens, I walked about the wood, and found a 
lone house, at the door of which a ^woman was sitting, 
in a languid state of health. She said she had just 
recovered from the fever, or chill; and among other 
inquiries, asked when we had last had this complaint. 
On being told we had never had it, she said, "I should 
like to live in your country, for among the Whites there 
is not one in this section of Georgia that has escaped." 
It is true, that consumption, so common in the Northern 



LYELUS TRAVELS 83 

states, and so often fatal, is unknown here, but the 
universality of the ague makes these low districts in 
the Southern states most unenviable dwelling-places. 
The best season for a geological tour in this part of 
Georgia and South Carolina, east of the mountains, 
is from December to April inclusive. 

I waited for the return of the owner of the lone 
house, and told him I wished to visit the plantation of 
Colonel Jones, at Millhaven. He consented to let me 
hire his barouche with one horse, telling me I must 
send it back the best way I could, after finding my 
own way for twelve miles through the pine forests, as 
he could spare me no driver. The lanes through the 
wood were numerous, and a storm had blown down 
so many tall pines across the road, each of which it was 
necessary to circumnavigate, that we thought our- 
selves fortunate when we arrived safe at the destined 
haven. My new host added to the kindness and frank- 
ness of a Southern planter, a strong love for my fav- 
ourite pursuits, and guided me at once to Jackson- 
borough, and other neighboring places, best worthy 
the attention of a geologist. 

We had many rides together through those woods, 
there being no underwood to prevent a horse from 
galloping freely in every direction. The long-leaved 
pines emit a faint odour somewhat resembling that of 
the hyacinth, and their bright-green foliage was finely 
brought out against the clear blue sky. The air was 
balmy, and unusually warm, even for Georgia in the 
first week of January. We saw several butterflies, one 



84 LYELUS TRAVELS 

of a bright yellow colour, and bats Hying about in the 
evening. The croaking of the frog and the chirping 
of the cricket were again heard. They had been silent 
a few days before, when the air was cooler. The sheep, 
which remain out in these woods all the winter, are 
now followed by lambs about three weeks old. I saw 
many black squirrels here, but only heard of the opos- 
sum, racoon, bear, and alligator, without seeing any. 
A few days ago, an alligator was shot fourteen feet 
long, in the act of carrying off a pig; and the sports- 
men complain to me that they devour their dogs when 
they follow the deer, which, on the first alarm, usually 
take to the Savannah river. 

I frequently observed the holes of the gopher, a kind 
of land-tortoise, which burrows in the sand, and is 
now hybernating below ground. Four or five inhabit 
one hole; their eggs are rather smaller than a hen's. 
They are gregarious, and in summer are seen feeding 
ten or twelve together on the low shrubs. They are 
said to be very strong for their size, and a negro- 
woman assured a lady of our party that she was so 
light that she might be ''toted by a gopher." We also 
saw small hillocks, such as are thrown up by our moles, 
made by a very singular animal, which they call the 
salamander, because, I believe, it is often seen to ap- 
pear when the woods are burnt. It is not a reptile, but 
a species of rat, with pouches on its cheeks. 

On quitting Millhaven, instead of continuing my 
voyage down the river, I hired a carriage to convey us 
to the town of Savannah, a distance of nearly one 



LYELUS TRAVELS 85 

hundred miles. Here and there I went down from the 
high road to examine the river-cHffs, consisting of 
bright red-coloured loam, red and grey clay, and white 
sand. One day, on returning from, the river, I came 
suddenly in the wood on some turkey-buzzards feeding 
on a dead hog. I had often seen since we crossed the 
Potomac these large black and grey birds soaring at 
a great height in the air, but I was now surprised to 
see one of them perch on a stump a few yards from me, 
and seem perfectly fearless. In our last day's journey, 
I remarked, for the first time in America, a large flight 
of rooks, some wheeling about in the air, others perched 
on trees. 

Near the village of Ebenezer we passed over a long 
causeway, made of logs, which for three quarters of a 
mile was under water. The tall cedars, and other 
trees arching over and forming a long aisle, reminded 
me exactly of the descriptions given of the canals in 
the Great Dismal Swamp. Some of the myrtles in 
these wet grounds are very fragrant. 

We were pursuing a line of road not much frequented 
of late, since the establishment of the railway from 
Augusta to Charleston. Our arrival, therefore, at the 
inns was usually a surprise, and instead of being wel- 
comed, we were invariably recommended to go on 
farther. When once admitted, we were made very 
comfortable, having our meals with the family, and 
being treated more like guests than customers. On 
one occasion our driver, to whose brother our carriage 
and horses belonged, fell in with the son of a neighbor- 



86 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

ing planter, who reproached him in a friendly manner 
for not having come to his house the night before, and 
brought us with him. The social equality which pre- 
vails here arises not so much from the spirit of a re- 
publican government, as from the fact of the whites 
constituting an aristocracy, for whom the negroes 
work. Had we availed ourselves of letters of intro- 
duction freely offered to us, we might have passed 
from the house of one hospitable planter to another, 
and heard as little of reckoning at inns as Don Quixote 
expected, after his study of the histories of knights 
errant. 

Jan. 10, 1842. — On the tenth day after leaving 
Augusta, we arrived at Savannah, from which town 
I immediately set out on an excursion through a flat, 
swampy country, resembling a large delta, to Beauly 
and the Vernon river, about fifteen miles to the south- 
east. I went to Heyner's Bridge, on the White Bluff 
creek, to see a spot about twelve miles from Savannah, 
where I had learnt from Dr. Habersham that bones of 
the mastodon and other extinct mar;imalia had been 
discovered. The bed of clay, about six feet thick, 
containing them, can only be seen at low water, and I 
descended to it in a boat when the tide was out; and 
by the aid of the negroes, obtained the grinder of the 
common American mastodon. The stratum enclosing 
these and other bones rests immediately on sand con- 
taining marine shells of living species, and is covered 
by the mud of a freshwater swamp, in which trees 
grow, and when thrown down by the winds, become 



LYELUS TRAVELS 87 

occasionally imbedded. One of the teeth given to me 
from this place by Dr. Habersham was ascertained, by 
Mr. Owen, to be referable to his new genus, Mylodon. 
Mr. Hamilton Couper afterwards sent me from a sim- 
ilar geological position, farther south in Georgia, near 
the mouth of the Altamaha, the tooth of a megathe- 
rium. It is evident, from his observations and my own, 
that at a comparatively recent period since the Atlan- 
tic was inhabited by the existing species of marine 
testacea, there was an upheaval and laying dry of the 
bed of the ocean in this region. The new land sup- 
ported forests in which the megatherium, mylodon, 
mastodon, elephant, a species of horse different from 
the common one, and other quadrupeds, lived, and 
were occasionally buried in the swamps. There have 
also been subsidences on the coast, and perhaps, far 
inland; for in many places near the sea there are signs 
of the forest having become submerged, the remains 
of erect trees being seen enveloped in stratified mud 
and sand; I even suspect that this coast is now sinking 
down, at a slow and insensible rate, for the sea is en- 
croaching and gaining at many points on the fresh- 
water marshes. Thus at Beauly I found upright 
stumps of trees of the pine, cedar, and ilex covered 
with live oysters and barnacles, and exposed at low 
tide, the deposit in which they were buried having 
been recently washed away from around them by the 
waves. I also observed, that the flat country of 
marshes was bounded on its western or inland side by 
a steep bank or ancient cliff cut in the sandy tertiary 



88 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

strata, and there are other inland cUffs of the same 
kind at different heights implying the successive ele- 
vation above the sea of the whole tertiary region. 

On the beach at Beauly I saw numerous foot-tracks 
of racoons and opossums on the sand, which had been 
made during the four hours immediately preceding, 
or since the ebbing of the tide. Already some of them 
were half filled with fine blown sand, showing the 
process by which distinct casts may be formed of the 
footsteps of animals in a stratum of quaftzose sand- 
stone. I remarked that the tracks of the racoons 
could be traced at several points to beds of oysters, 
on which these animals are said to feed. The negroes 
told me, that sometimes a large oyster closes his shell 
suddenly, and holds the racoon fast by the paw till the 
returning tide comes up and drowns him. 

The surface of the beach for half a mile was covered 
with small round pellets of mud as thick as hail-stones, 
of the size of currants and peas, and arranged for the 
most part in small heaps. These are made by thou- 
sands of land crabs, which they call fiddlers, because 
the motion of their claws is compared to the arm of a 
player on the violin. By the side of each heap was 
a perpendicular hole several inches deep, into which 
when alarmed the crab retreats sideways, sometimes 
disappearing, but often leaving the larger claw pro- 
jecting above for want of room. They make these 
holes by rolling the wet sand into pellets, and then 
bringing up each ball separately to the surface. 

A planter of this country told me it was amusing to 



LYELUS TRAVELS 89 

see a flock of turkies driven down for the first time 
from the interior to feed on the crabs in the marine 
marshes. They, at first, walk about in a ludicrous 
state of alarm, expecting their toes to be pinched, but 
after a time, one bolder than the rest is tempted by 
hunger to snap up a small fiddler, after which the rest 
fall to and devour them by thousands. On my way 
through the woods in this low region near Savannah, 
I saw some fine magnolias ninety feet high, palmettos 
six feet high in tufts, and oaks hung with white pend- 
ant wreaths, sometimes ten feet long, of the wiry par- 
asitic Tillandsia usnaeoides. This climber, which also 
festoons the woods in South America, much resembles 
the lichen called in England ''old man's beard," but is 
a phenogamous plant. 

In order to see the bed of clay containing the bones 
of the mastodon at Heyner's Bridge, it was necessary 
for me to be on the ground by daybreak at low tide. 
With this in view, I left Savannah in the middle of 
the night. The owner of the property kindly lent me 
his black servant as a guide, and I found him provided 
with a passport, without which no slave can go out 
after dusk. The exact streets through which he was 
to pass in his way to me were prescribed, and had he 
strayed from this route he might have been committed 
to the guard-house. These and other precautionary 
regulations, equally irksome to the slaves and their 
masters, are said to have become necessary after an 
insurrection brought on by abolitionist missionaries, 
who are spoken of here in precisely the same tone as 



90 LYELUS TRAVELS 

incendiaries, or beasts of prey whom it would be meri- 
torious to shoot or hang. In this savage and deter- 
mined spirit I heard some planters speak who were 
mild in their manners, and evidently indulgent to their 
slaves. Nearly half the entire population of this state 
are of the coloured race, who are said to be as excitable 
as they are ignorant. Many proprietors live with their 
wives and children in the midst of the slaves, so that 
the danger of any popular movement is truly appalling. 

The negroes, so far as I have yet seen them, whether 
in domestic service or on the farms, appear very cheer- 
ful and free from care, better fed than a large part of 
the labouring class of Europe; and, although meanly 
dressed, and often in patched garments never scantily 
clothed for the climate. We asked a woman in Geor- 
gia, whether she was the slave of the family of our ac- 
quaintance. She replied, merrily, ''Yes, I belong to 
them, and they belong to me." She was, in fact, born 
and brought up on the estate. 

On another occasion we were proceeding in a well- 
appointed carriage wath a planter, w^hen we came 
unexpectedly to a dead halt. Inquiring the cause, the 
black coachman said he had dropped one of his white 
gloves on the road, and must drive back and try to 
find it. He could not recollect within a mile where 
he had last seen it: we remonstrated, but in vain. 
As time pressed, the master in despair took off his own 
gloves, and saying he had a second pair, gave them 
to him. When our charioteer had deliberately put 
them on, we started again, 



CHAPTER IX 

Return to Charleston — Severe Frost in 1835 in South Carolina — 
Causes of the increased Insalubrity of the Low Regions of South Car- 
olina — Condition of Slave Population — Gradual Emancipation 
equally desirable for the Whites and the Coloured Race. 

Jan. 13, 1842. — From Savannah we returned to 
Charleston in a steam-ship, on board of which we found 
an agreeable party, consisting chiefly of officers of the 
U. S. army returning from Florida, where they had 
nearly brought to a close a war of extermination carried 
on for many years against the Seminole Indians. They 
gave a lively picture of the hardships they underwent 
in the swamps and morasses during this inglorious 
campaign, in the course of which the lives of perhaps 
as many whites as Seminoles were sacrificed. The war 
is said to have been provoked by the attacks of the 
Indians on the new settlers. 

When discoursing here on the influence of climate, 
many accounts were given me of a frost which visited 
Charleston in February, 1835, so severe that wine was 
frozen in bottles. The tops of the Pride-of-India tree, of 
Chinese origin, were killed: all the oranges, of which 
there were large orchards, were destroyed. Beds of 
oysters, exposed between high and low water mark, 
perished in the estuaries, and the effluvia from them 

91 



92 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

was so powerful as to injure the health of the inhabit- 
ants. 

Several planters attribute the failure of the cotton 
crop this year (1842) to the unusual size and number 
of the icebergs, which floated southwards last spring 
from Hudson's and Baffin's Bays, and may have cooled 
the sea and checked the early growth of the cotton 
plant. So numerous and remote are the disturbing 
causes in meteorology! Forty degrees of latitude in- 
tervene between the region where the ice-floes are 
generated and that where the crops are raised, whose 
death-warrant they are supposed to have carried with 
them. 

On the banks of the Cooper river, we heard occa- 
sionally the melodious and liquid note of the mocking- 
bird in the woods. It is of a fearless disposition, and 
approaches very near to the houses. I can well imagine 
that in summer, when the leaves are out, and the 
flowers in full splendor, this region must be most beauti- 
ful. But it is then that the planters are compelled by 
the fever and ague to abandon their country seats. It 
was not so formerly. When the English army was 
campaigning on the Cooper and Santee rivers in the 
revolutionary war, they encamped with impunity in 
places where it would now be death to remain for a few 
days in the hot season. I inquired what could have 
caused so great a change and found the phenomenon 
as much a matter of controversy as the origin of the 
malaria in Italy. The clearing away of the wood from 
large spaces is the chief alteration in the physical con- 



LYELUS TRAVELS 93 

dition of this region in the course of the last sixty years, 
whereby the damp and swampy grounds undergo an- 
nually the process of being dried up by a burning sun. 
Marshes which are overflowed by the tide twice in 
every tw^enty-four hours near the neighbouring coast, 
both in South Carolina and Georgia, are perfectly 
healthy. Dr. Arnold remarks, in his Roman History, 
that Rome was more healthy before the drainage of the 
Campagna, and when there was more natural wood in 
Italy and in northern Europe generally. In the south- 
ern States of the Union there are no fevers in the win- 
ter, at a season when there is no large extent of damp 
and boggy soil exposed to a hot sun, and undergoing 
desiccation. 

As there were no inns in that part of South Carolina 
through which we passed in this short tour, and as we 
were every where received hospitably by the planters, 
I had many opportunities of seeing their mode of life, 
and the condition of the domestic and farm slaves. In 
some rich houses maize, or Indian corn, and rice were 
entirely substituted for wheaten bread. The usual 
style of living is that of English country gentlemen. 
They have well-appointed carriages and horses, and 
well-trained black servants. The conversation of the 
gentlemen turned chiefly on agricultural subjects, 
shooting, and horse-racing. Several of the mansions 
were surrounded with deer-parks. 

Arriving often at a late hour at our quarters in the 
evening, we heard the negroes singing loudly and joy- 
ously in chorus after their day's work was over. On 



94. LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

one estate, about forty black children were brought up 
daily before the windows of the planter's house, and 
fed in sight of the family, otherwise, we were told, the 
old women who have charge of them might, in the 
absence of the parents, appropriate part of their allow- 
ance to themselves. All the slaves have some animal 
food daily. When they are ill, they sometimes refuse to 
take medicine except from the hands of the master or 
mistress; and it is of all tasks the most delicate for the 
owners to decide when they are really sick, and when 
only shamming from indolence. 

After the accounts I had read of the sufferings of 
slaves, I was agreeably surprised to find them, in gen- 
eral, so remarkably cheerful and light-hearted. It is 
true that I saw no gangs working under overseers on 
sugar-plantations, but out of two millions and a half of 
slaves in the United States, the larger proportion are 
engaged in such farming occupations and domestic 
services as I witnessed in Georgia and South Carolina. 
I was often for days together with negroes who served 
me as guides, and found them as talkative and chatty 
as children, usually boasting of their master's wealth, 
and their own peculiar merits. 

South Carolina is one of the few states wdiere there is 
a numerical preponderance of slaves. One night, at 
Charleston, I went to see the guard-house, where there 
is a strong guard kept constantly in arms, and on the 
alert. Every citizen is obliged to serve in person, or 
find a substitute; and the maintenance of such a force, 
the strict laws against importing books relating to 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 05 

emancipation, and the prohibition to bring back slaves 
who have been taken by their masters into free states, 
show that the fears of the owner, whether well-founded 
or not, are real. 

A philanthropist may well be perplexed when he 
desires to devise some plan of interference which may 
really promote the true interests of the negro. But 
the way in which the planters would best consult their 
own interests appears to me very clear. They should 
exhibit more patience and courage towards the abo- 
litionists, w^hose influence and numbers they greatly 
overrate, and lose no time in educating the slaves, and 
encouraging private manumission to prepare the way 
for general emancipation. All seem agreed that the 
states most ripe for this great reform are Maryland, 
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and 
Missouri. Experience has proved in the northern 
States that emancipation immediately checks the in- 
crease of the coloured population, and causes the rel- 
ative number of the whites to augment very rapidly. 
Every year, in proportion as the north-western States 
fill up, and as the boundary of the new settlers in the 
west is removed farther and farther, beyond the Missis- 
sippi and Missouri, the cheaper and more accessible 
lands south of the Potomac will offer a more tempting 
field for colonization to the swarms of New Englanders, 
who are averse to migrating into slave states. Before 
this influx of white labourers, the coloured race will 
give way, and it will require the watchful care of the 
philanthropist, whether in the north or south; to pre- 



96 LYELUS TRAVELS 

vent them from being thrown out of employment and 
reduced to destitution. 

If due exertions be made to cultivate the minds, and 
protect the rights and privileges of the negroes, and it 
nevertheless be found that they cannot contend, when 
free, with white competitors, but are superseded by 
them, still the cause of humanity will have gained. 
The coloured people, though their numbers remain 
stationary, or even diminish, may in the meantime be 
happier than now, and attain to a higher moral rank. 
They would, moreover, escape the cruelty and injustice 
which are the invariable consequences of the exercise 
of irresponsible power, especially where authority must 
be sometimes delegated by the planter to agents of in- 
ferior education and coarser feelings. And last not 
least, emancipation would effectually put a stop to the 
breeding, selling, and exporting of slaves to the sugar- 
growing States of the South, where, unless the ac- 
counts we usually read of slavery be exaggerated and 
distorted, the life of the negro is shortened by severe 
toil and sufferiu"-. 



CHAPTER X 

Wilmington, N. C. — Mount Vernon — Return to Philadelphia — 
Reception of Mr. Dickens. 

Jan. 22. — I now turned my course northwards, and, 
after a short voyage in a steamer from Charleston, 
landed at Wilmington, in North Carolina. I then went 
by railway to South Washington, visiting several 
farms on the banks of the north-east branch of Cape 
Fear river. 

On several of the small plantations here I found the 
proprietors by no means in a thriving state, evidently 
losing ground from year to year, and some of them 
talking of abandoning the exhausted soil, and migrating 
with their slaves to the south-western States. If, while 
large numbers of the negroes were thus carried to the 
South, slavery had been abolished in North Carolina, 
the black population might ere this have been reduced 
in numbers considerably, without suffering those priva- 
tions to which a free competition with white labourers 
must expose them, wherever great facilities for emi- 
gration are not afforded. 

A railway train shooting rapidly in the dark through 
the pine forests of North Carolina has a most singular 
appearance; resembling a large rocket fired horizon- 

97 



98 LYELL'S TRAVELS 

tally, with a brilliant stream of revolving sparks ex- 
tending behind the engine for several hundred yards, 
each spark being a minute particle of wood, which after 
issuing from the chimney of the furnace, remains ignited 
for several seconds in the air. Now and then these 
fiery particles which are invisible by day, instead of 
lagging in the rear, find entrance by favour of the wind 
through the open windows of the car, and, while some 
burn holes in the traveller's cloak, others make their 
way into his eyes, causing them to smart most pain- 
fully. 

From the deck of our steam-boat on the Potomac 
we saw Mount Vernon, formerly the plantation of Gen- 
eral Washington. Instead of exhibiting, like farms in 
the northern States, a lively picture of progress and 
improvement, this property was described to me by 
all as worn out, and of less value now than in the days 
of its illustrious owner. The bears and wolves, they 
say, are actually re-entering their ancient haunts, which 
would scarcely have happened if slavery had been abol- 
ished in Virginia.^ 

The air was balmy on the Potomac the last day of 
January, and the winter had been so mild in the south- 
ern States, that we were surprised, on recrossing the 
Susquehanna at Havre de Grace in Maryland, to see 
large masses of floating ice brought down from the. Ap- 
palachian hills, and to feel the air sensibly cooled while 
we were ferried over the broad river. It struck me as a 
curious coincidence, and one not entirely accidental, 
that, precisely in this part of our journey, I once more 



LYELUS TRAVELS 99 

saw the low grounds covered with huge boulders, re- 
minding me how vast a territory in the South I had 
passed over without encountering a single erratic 
block. These far transported fragments of rock are 
decidedly a northern phenomenon, or belong to the 
colder latitudes of the globe, being rare and exceptional 
in warmer regions. 

Philadelphia, Feb. 1. — The newspapers are filled 
with accounts of the enthusiastic reception which Mr. 
Charles Dickens is meeting with every where. Such 
homage has never been paid to any foreigner since 
Lafayette visited the States. The honours may appear 
extravagant, but it is in the nature of popular enthu- 
siasm to run into excess. I find that several of my 
American friends are less disposed than I am to sympa- 
thise with the movement, regarding it as more akin to 
lion-hunting than hero-worship. They express a doubt 
whether Walter Scott, had he visited the U. S., would 
have been so much idolised. Perhaps not; for Scott's 
poems and romances were less extensively circulated 
amongst the millions than the tales of Dickens. There 
may be no precedent in Qreat Britain for a whole people 
thus unreservedly indulging their feelings of admiration 
for a favorite author; but if so, the Americans deserve 
the more credit for obeying their warm impulses. Of 
course, many who attend the foreigner's crowded levee 
are merely gratifying a vulgar curiosity by staring at 
an object of notoriety; but none but a very intelligent 
population could be thus carried away to flatter and 
applaud a man who has neither rank, wealth, nor power, 



100 LYELL'S TRAVELS 

who is not a military hero or a celeln-ated poHtical 
character, but simply a writer of genius, whose pictures 
of men and manners, and whose works of fiction, have 
been here, as in his own country, an inexhaustible 
source of interest and amusement. 



CHAPTER XI 

Philadelphia — Financial Crisis — Payments of State Dividends 
suspended — General Distress and private Losses of the Americans — 
Debt of Pennsylvania — Public Works — Direct Taxes — Deficient 
Revenue — Bad Faith and Confiscation — Solvency and Good Faith 
of the Majority of the States — Confidence of American Capitalists 
— General Progress of Society, and Prospects of the Republic. 

Philadelphia, January to March, 1842. — Wishing 
to borrow some books at a circulating Hbrary, I pre- 
sented several dollar notes as a deposit. At home there 
might have been a ringing of coin upon the counter, to 
ascertain whether it was true or counterfeit; here the 
shop woman referred to a small pamphlet, re-edited 
'^ semi-monthly," called a '^Detector," and containing 
an interminable list of banks in all parts of the Union, 
with information as to their present condition, whether 
solvent or not, and whether paying in specie, and add- 
ing a description of ''spurious notes." After* a slight 
hesitation, the perplexed librarian shook her head, and 
declaring her belief that my notes were as good as any 
others, said, if I would promise to take them back 
again on my return, and pay her in cash, I might have 
the volumes. 

It often happened that when we offered to buy arti- 
cles of small value in shops, or fruit in the market, the 
venders declined to have any dealings with us, unless 
we paid in specie. They remarked that their change 

101 



102 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

might in a few days be worth more than our paper. 
Many farmers and gardeners are ceasing to bring their 
produce to market, ah hough the crops are very abund- 
ant, and prices are rising higher and higher, as if the 
city was besieged. My American friends, anxious that 
I should not be a loser, examined all my dollar notes, 
and persuaded me, before I set out on my travels, to 
convert them into gold, at a discount of eight per cent. 
In less than four weeks after this transaction, there 
was a general return to cash payments, and the four 
banks by which the greater part of my paper had been 
issued, all failed. 

A parallel might perhaps be found for a crash of this 
kind in the commercial and financial history of Eng- 
land, or at least in some of her colonies, Australia, for 
example, where the unbounded facility afforded to a 
new country of borrowing the superabundant capital 
of an old one, has caused a sudden rise in the value of 
lands, houses, and goods, and promoted the maddest 
speculations. But an event now occurred of a different 
and far more serious nature. One morning we were 
told that the Governor of Pennsylvania had come in 
great haste from Harrisburg, in consequence of the 
stoppage of one of the banks in the city, in which w'ere 
lodged the funds intended for the payment of dividends 
on state bonds, due in a few days. On this emergency 
he endeavoured to persuade other banks to advance the 
money, but in vain; such was the general alarm, and 
feeling of insecurity. The consequent necessity of a 
delay of payment was announced, and many native 



LYELUS TRAVELS 103 

holders of stock expressed to me their fears, that al- 
though they might obtain the dividend then actually 
due, it might be long before they received another. 
At the same time they declared their conviction, that 
the resources of the State, if well managed, were ample; 
and that, if it depended on the more affluent merchants 
of Philadelphia, and the richer portion of the middle 
class generally, to impose and pay the taxes, the honour 
of Pennsylvania would not be compromised. 

It was painful to witness the ruin and distress occa- 
sioned by this last blow, following, as it did, so many 
previous disasters. Men advanced in years, and re- 
tired from active life, after success in business, or at the 
bar, or after military service, too old to migrate with 
their families to the West, and begin the world again, 
are left destitute; many widows and single women have 
lost their all, and great numbers of the poorer classes 
are deprived of their savings. An erroneous notion 
prevails in England that the misery created by these 
bankruptcies is confined chiefly to foreigners, but, in 
fact, many of the poorest citizens of Pennsylvania, and 
of other states, had invested money in these securities. 
In 1844, or two years after my stay in Philadelphia, 
The Savings' Bank of New York presented a petition 
to the legislature at Harrisburg for a resumption of 
payment of dividends, in which it is stated that their 
bank then held 300,000 dollars, and had held 800,000, 
but was obliged to sell 500,000 at a great depreciation, 
in order to pay the claimants, who were compelled by 
the distress of the times to withdraw their deposits. 



104 LYELUS TRAVELS 

It appears that in the year 1831, when Pennsylvania 
borrowed a large sum for making railways and canals, 
she imposed direct taxes for seven years, for the ex- 
press purpose of regularly paying the interest of her 
debt. It was hoped, from the experience of New York, 
that, at the expiration of that term of years, the public 
works would become sufficiently profitable to render it 
unnecessary to renew the tax. The inhabitants went 
on paying until the year 1836, when the government 
thought itself justified in remitting the burden, on be- 
ing unexpectedly enriched by several large sums from 
various sources. In that year they received for granting 
a charter to the U. S. Bank of Pennsylvania 2,600,000 
dollars, and 2,800,000 more for their share of monies 
which had accumulated in the treasury of the Federal 
Government, arising out of the sale of public lands, and 
then divided among the states. It was calculated that 
these funds would last for three years, and that the 
public works would by that time yield a revenue suf- 
ficient to defray the interest of the sum laid out on 
executing them. 

That the legislature should have seized the first 
opportunity of relieving their constituents from the 
direct taxes will astonish no one who has perused the 
printed paper of the tax-assessor in Pennsylvania, 
which every one is required to fill up. The necessity 
of ascertaining the means of persons possessed of small 
property renders the questions exceedingly minute and 
inquisitorial. From a variety of others, I extract 
the following: — ''What is the amount of your monies 



LYELUS TRAVELS 105 

loaned on mortgage, and the debts due to you by sol- 
vent debtors?" ''What interest do they pay?" ''What 
shares do you hold in any bank or company in any other 
State?" " How many pleasure carriages do you keep?" 
"How many watches do you own? — are they gold or 
silver?" and so forth. 

Soon after the ill-judged remission of this tax, a 
great combination of circumstances led to over-trading, 
and the most extravagant schemes of money-making. 
The United States' Bank, during its controversy with 
President Jackson, had accumulated a large amount of 
specie, and lent it out most lavishly and imprudently; 
and when it obtained a new charter from Pennsylvania, 
it again promoted loans of all kinds, which gave an 
inordinate stimulus to speculation. Some of the great 
London banks, at the same time, gave credit to a 
prodigious amount, often without sufficient caution; 
and when they were compelled to withdraw this credit 
suddenly, they had no time to distinguish which of their 
creditors were worthy of confidence. A great fire in 
New York, in 1835, had annihilated property to the 
value of six millions sterling. After the United States' 
Bank had ceased to be connected with the Federal 
Government, many other States, besides Pennsylvania, 
granted charters to banks, which led to an over-issue of 
notes, and a hot-bed forcing of trade throughout the 
Union. Then came, in 1839, the miserable expedient of 
authorizing banks to suspend cash payments, and in 
1841, the stoppage of the great U. S. Bank of Pennsyl- 
vania^ followed by a general panic and financial crisis. 



CHAPTER XII 

New York City — Residence in New York — Effects on Society of 
increased Intercourse of distant States — Separation of the Capital 
and Metropolis — Climate — Lectures for the Working Classes. 

New York, March, 1842. — We spent several weeks 
at New York, and soon found ourselves at home in the 
society of persons to some of whom we had letters of 
introduction from near relatives in England, and others 
whom we had met at distant places in the course of our 
tour. So many American citizens migrate from north 
to south for the sake of the mild winters, or attendance 
on Congress, or the supreme courts at Washington, or 
congregate in large watering places during the summer, 
or have children or brothers in the Far West; every- 
where there is so much intercourse, personal and episto- 
lary, between scientific and literary men in remote 
states, who have often received their university edu- 
cation far from home, that in each new city where we 
sojourn our American friends and acquaintances seem 
to know something of each other, and to belong to the 
same set in society. The territorial extent and political 
independence of the different States of the Union re- 
mind the traveller rather of the distinct nations of 
Europe than of the different counties of a single king- 
dom like England; but the population has spread so 

106 



LYELUS TRAVELS 107 

fast from certain centres, especially from New England, 
and the facilities of communication by railway and 
steam-boat are so great, and are always improving so 
rapidly, that the twenty-six republics of 1842, having a 
population of seventeen millions, are more united, and 
belong more thoroughly to one nation than did the 
thirteen States in 1776, when their numbers were only 
three millions. In spite of the continual decline of the 
federal authority, and the occasional conflict of com- 
mercial interests between the North and the South, and 
the violent passions excited by the anti-slavery move- 
ment, the old colonial prejudices have been softening 
down from year to year, the English language, laws, 
and literature, have pervaded more and more the 
Dutch, German, and French settlements, and the dan- 
ger of the dismemberment of the confederacy appears 
to all reflecting politicians less imminent now th^n 
formerly. 

I dined with Mr. Astor, now far advanced in years, 
whose name is well known to the readers of Washing- 
ton Irving's '^ Astoria." He informed me that he was 
about to found a large public library in New York, 
which I rejoice to hear, as the scientific men and natu- 
ralists of this country can rarely afford to purchase ex- 
pensive European works with numerous illustrations. 
I often regretted, during my short residence here, that 
the town of Albany, 150 miles distant, is destined, be- 
cause it is the capital, to possess the splendid collection 
of minerals, rocks, and fossils obtained during the late 
government survey. The surveyors are now employed 



108 LYELUS TRAVELS 

in arranging these treasures in a museum, which would 
have been far more useful and more frequently con- 
sulted if placed in the midst of this wealthy metropo- 
lis, having a population of 300,000 souls. Foreigners, 
indeed, who have only visited New York for commer- 
cial purposes, may imagine that all the inhal^itants are 
exclusively engrossed with trade and money-making; 
but there is a college here, and many large and flourish- 
ing literary and scientific institutions. I received nu- 
merous invitations to deliver lectures on geology, but 
had scarcely time to finish one short course when I was 
reminded, by the breaking up of winter, that I could 
resume my operations in the field. ^ 

It was now the second week of April, and alread}' the 
willows on the ''Battery" were putting forth their 
yellowish-green leaves. The air was as warm as in an 
English summer, although a few days before the ground 
had been covered with snow. Such sudden changes 
are trying to many constitutions; and we are told 
that if we staid a second year in the United States we 
should feel the influence of the climate, and begin to lose 
that freshness of colour which marks the newly-arrived 
Englishman. The greater sallowness of complexion 
here is attributed to the want of humidity in the air; 
and we ought to congratulate ourselves that there is 
no lack of that ingredient in the atmosphere of Great 
Britain. We continue to be surpi-ised at the clearness 
of the skies, and the number of fine days and bright 
star-light nights, on this side of the Atlantic. 

At a small New England town in the Taconic hills I 



LYELVS TRAVELS 109 

was getting some travelling instructions at the inn, 
when a carpenter entered who had just finished his 
day's work, and asked what lecture would be given 
that evening. The reply was, Mr. N. on the Astronomy 
of the Middle Ages. He then inquired if it was gratis, 
and was answered in the negative, the price being 
twenty-five cents (or one shilling English); upon which 
he said he should go, and accordingly returned home to 
dress. It reflects no small credit on the national system 
of education in New England, that crowds of the labour- 
ing classes of both sexes should seek recreation, after 
the toils of the day are over, in listening to discourses 
of this kind. Among the most popular subjects of 
lectures which I saw announced in newspapers were 
Temperance, a cause which has made great progress of 
late years among Protestants as well as Catholics, and 
which began in the U. S. fifteen years before the cor- 
responding movement in Great Britain; Phrenology, to 
the pretensions of which the Americans lend too credu- 
lous an ear; the History of the American Revolution; 
the Present State and Past History of China; Travels in 
the Holy Land; Meteorology, and a variety of other 
topics. 

I alluded to some Indians settled near Gayhead, a 
remnant of the aborigines, who have been protected 
by the Government of Massachusetts, all sales of land 
by them to the whites being null and void by law. 
They make excellent sailors in the whale-fishery of the 
South Seas, a source of great wealth to the inhabitants 
of 'Hhe Vineyard," and of New Bedford on the main 



110 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

land. That occupation, with all its privations and 
dangers, seems admirably suited to the bodily constitu- 
tion and hereditary instinct of a hunter tribe, to whom 
steady and continuous labour is irksome and injurious. 
The history of the extermination of the aboriginal 
Indians of New England is a melancholy tale, especially 
after so many successful exertions had been made to 
educate and christianize them. When at Harvard Col- 
lege, a copy of the Bible was shown me by Mr. .Tared 
Sparks, translated by the missionary Father Elliott 
into the Indian tongue. It is now a dead language, al- 
though preached for several generations to crowded 
congregations. 



CHAPTER XTII 

Popular Libraries in New England — Large Sales of Literary 
Works in the United States — American Universities — Harvard 
College near Boston — English Universities — Peculiarities of their 
System. 

April 25. — Munificent bequests and donations for 
public purposes, whether charitable or educational, 
form a striking feature in the modern history of the 
United States, and especially of New England. Not 
only is it common for rich capitalists to leave by will a 
portion of their fortune towards the endowment of 
national institutions, but individuals during their life- 
time make magnificent grants of money for the same 
objects. There is here no compulsory law for the equal 
partition of property among children, as in France, 
and, on the other hand, no custom of entail or pri- 
mogeniture, as in England, so that the affluent feel 
themselves at liberty to share their wealth between 
their kindred and the public; it being impossible to 
found a family, and parents having frequently the 
happiness of seeing all their children well provided for 
and independent long before their death. I have seen 
a list of bequests and donations made during the last 
thirty years, for the benefit of religious, charitable, and 
literary institutions in the State of Massachusetts alone, 

111 



112 LYELUS TRAVELS 

and they amounted to no less a sum than six millions 
of dollars, or more than a million sterling. 

There are popular libraries in almost every village of 
Massachusetts, and a growing taste for the reading of 
good books is attested by the sale of large editions of 
such works as Herschel's Natural Philosophy, Wash- 
ington Irving's Columbus, and Plutarch's Lives. Of 
each of these from five to twenty thousand copies have 
been sold. It will seem still more remarkable, that no 
less than sixteen thousand copies have been purchased 
of Johnes's Translation of Froissart's Chronicles, illus- 
trated by w^ood-engravings, and twelve thousand of 
Liebig's Animal Chemistry. These editions w^ere very 
cheap, as there was no author's copyright; but it is still 
more surprising, that about four thousand copies of 
Prescott's Mexico should have been sold in one year in 
the U. S. at the price of six dollars, or about twenty-six 
shillings. When, in addition to these signs of the times, 
we remember the grants before alluded to, of the New 
England and other states in behalf of public schools and 
scientific surveys, w^e may indulge very sanguine hopes 
of the future progress of this country towards a high 
standard of general civilization. 

The universities of the United States are annually 
increasing in number, and their discipline in New Eng- 
land (to which my inquiries on this head were chiefly 
confined) is very strict; a full staff of professors, with 
their assistants or tutots, superintending at once the 
moral conduct and intellectual culture of the students. 
In Harvard Collogo, Cambridge, near Boston, the best 



LYELVS TRAVELS 113 

endowed university in the United States, there are 
thirty-two professors, each assisted by one or more 
tutors. Many of them are well known in the literary 
world as authors. Five only of the thirty-two were 
educated for the pulpit, three of whom are professors 
of divinity, one of ethics, and one of history. All the 
students are required to attend divine service in the 
churches to which they severally belong, but the di- 
vinity school for professional education is Unitarian. 
The proportion of professors to students (about 400 in 
number) is far greater than that of college tutors in the 
English universities. The tutors of Harvard College 
may be compared, in some degree, to our private tutors, 
except that they are more under the direction of the 
professors, being selected by them from among the 
graduates, as the best scholars, and each is specially 
devoted to some one department of learning. These 
tutors, from whose number the professors are very 
commonly chosen, usually teach the freshmen, or first- 
year students, or prepare pupils for the professors' 
lectures. Care is also bestowed on the classification of 
the young men, according to their acquirements, tal- 
ents, and tastes. To accomplish this object, the stu- 
dent, on entering, may offer to undergo an examina- 
tion, and, if he succeeds, he may pass at once into the 
second, third, or fourth year's class, the intermediate 
steps being dispensed with; he may also choose certain 
subjects of study, which are regarded as equivalents, or 
are exchangeable with others. Thus, in the four years 
of the regular academical course, a competent knowl- 



114 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

edge of Latin, Greek, and of various branches of mathe- 
matics, is exacted from all; but, in regard to other sub- 
jects, such as moral philosophy, modern languages, 
chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, some of them may 
be substituted for others, at the option of the pupil. 
There are public examinations at the end of every term 
for awarding honours or ascertaining the proficiency of 
students; who, if they have i)een negligent, are put 
back into a previous year's class, the period of taking 
their degree being in that case deferred. Honours are 
obtainable for almost every subject taught by any pro- 
fessor; but emulation is not relied upon as the chief 
inducement for study. After passing an examination 
for the fourth year's class, the student can obtain the 
degree of Bachelor of Arts, and may enter the divinity, 
medical, or law schools. 

Every inquiry into the present state of the univer- 
sities in America drew forth from my informants, in 
return, many questions respecting Oxford and Cam- 
bridge. In the first place, then, the mass of students or 
undergraduates at Oxford is divided into twenty-four 
separate communities or colleges, very unequal in num- 
ber, the residents in each varjdng from 10 in the smaller 
to about 140 in the larger colleges, and the whole busi- 
ness of educating these separate sections of the youth is 
restricted to the tutors of the separate colleges. Conse- 
quently, two or three individuals, and occasionally a 
single instructor, may be called upon to give lectures in 
all the departments of human knowledge embraced in 
the academical course of four years. If the college is 



■LYELUS TRAVELS 115 

small, there is only occupation and salary sufficient to 
support one tutor; any attempt, therefore, to sub- 
divide the different branches of learning and sciences 
among distinct teachers is abandoned. There is no 
opportunity for one man to concentrate the powers of 
his mind on a single department of learning, to en- 
deavour to enlarge its bounds, and carefully to form 
and direct the opinions of his pupil. In a few of the 
larger colleges, indeed, some rude approach to such a 
partition is made, so far as to sever the mathematical 
from the classical studies; but even then the tutors in 
each division, are often called upon, in the public ex- 
aminations, to play their part in both departments. 
Thus, a single instructor gives lectures or examines in 
the writings of the Greek and Roman historians, phi- 
losophers, and poets, together with logic, the elements 
of mathematics, and theology. 

For the benefit of my foreign readers, it may be as 
well to remark, that the scholars to be taught are not 
boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, at 
which latter age the degree of Bachelor of Arts was very 
commonly conferred in the olden times at Oxford, but 
young men between eighteen and twenty-two, who, at 
the expiration of their academical course, usually quit 
college and enter at once upon a profession, or into 
political life. 

When we inquire by what kind of training young men 
can best be prepared, before leaving the university, 
to enter upon the study or practice of their professions, 
whether as lawyers, physicians, clergymen, school- 



116 LYELUS TRAVELS' 

masters, tutors, or legislators, can we assent to the 
notion that, by confining instruction to pure mathe- 
matics, or the classical writers, more especially if the 
latter are not treated in a critical spirit, we shall ac- 
complish this end? Do not these belong precisely to 
the class of subjects in which there is least danger of 
the student's going wrong, even if he engages in them 
at home and alone? Should it not be one of our chief 
objects to prepare him to form sound opinions in mat- 
ters connected with moral, political, or physical science? 
Here, indeed, he needs the aid of a trustworthy guide, 
and director, w^ho shall teach him to weigh evidence, 
point out to him the steps by which truth has been 
gradually attained in the inductive philosophy, the 
caution to be used in collecting facts and drawing con- 
clusions, the prejudices which are hostile to a fair in- 
quiry, and who, while his pupil is interested in the 
\vorks of the ancients, shall remind him that, as knowl- 
edge is progressive, he must avail himself of the latest 
acquisitions of his own age, in order to attain views 
more comprehensive and correct than those enjoyed 
even by predecessors of far superior capacity and 
genius. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Dr. Charming — Agitation in Rhode Island — Armed Convention 
— Journey to Philadelphia and Baltimore — Harper's Ferry — Pas- 
sage over the Alleghanies by National Road — Parallel Ridges — 
Kentucky Farmers — Emigrants. 

April 17, 1842. — During my stay at Boston, I was 
fortunate enough to hear Dr. Channing preach one of 
the last sermons he deUvered from the pulpit. His de- 
clining health had prevented him from doing regular 
duty of late years; but there seemed no reason to antici- 
pate that he would so soon be taken away from a com- 
munity over which he exerted a great and salutary in- 
fluence. His sermon was less impressive than I had 
expected, and fell short of the high conception I had 
formed of him from his writings; but this I imputed 
entirely to his want of physical strength, and the weak 
state of his voice. I had afterwards the pleasure of con- 
versing freely with him at a small dinner party on 
various subjects in which he was interested; among 
others, the bearing of geological discoveries, respecting 
the earth's antiquity and the extinct races of animals, 
on the Mosaic account of the history of men and the 
creation. I was struck with the lively interest he took 
in the political affairs of Rhode Island, — a neighboring 
state, containing about 110,000 inhabitants, and now 

117 



118 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

convulsed by a revolutionary movement in favor of 
an extension of the suffrage. The sympathies of Dr. 
Channing appeared to lean strongly to the popular 
party, which, in his opinion, had grievances to complain 
of, however much, by their violent proceedings, they 
had put themselves in the wrong. 

As some alarmists assured me that the railway to 
Providence, by which I intended to pass southwards in 
a few days, 'Svas commanded by the cannon of the in- 
surgents," my curiosity was awakened to inquire into 
this affair, the details of which were not uninstructive, 
as giving a curious insight into the character of the New 
England people, and showing their respect for law and 
order, even when their passions are highly excited. I 
found that Rhode Island was still, in the year 1842, 
governed according to a charter granted by Charles II. 
in the year 1663, no alteration having been made in the 
qualifications of voters at the period when the sover- 
eignty was transferred from the crown of Great Britian 
to the freeholders of Rhode Island. Although the State 
has been flourishing, and is entirely free from debt, a 
large majority of the people have, for the last forty 
years, called loudly on the privileged landholders to 
give up their exclusive right of voting, and to extend 
the suffrage to all the adult males, in accordance with 
the system established in all the neighboring States. 
The dispute turned mainly on a question of a very 
abstract nature for the comprehension of the multitude, 
though in reality one of great constitutional importance; 
namely, whether the change should be made according 



LYELL'S TRAVELS 119 

to the forms prescribed in the charter of 1663, or might 
be effected by the people in its capacity of sovereign, 
without regard to any estabUshed forms. The latter 
method was advocated by the democratic leaders as 
most flattering to the people, and w^ith such success 
that they organized a formidable association in oppo- 
sition to the government. Their demands did not dif- 
fer very materially from those which the legislature was 
willing to concede, except that the democrats claimed 
the suffrage, not only for every American-born citizen, 
but also for the new-comers, or the settlers of a few 
years' standing. Both parties agreed to exclude the 
free blacks. At length, as their wishes were not com- 
plied with, the '^Suffrage Convention" resolved to in- 
timidate their opponents by a military enrolment and 
drilling, and were soon joined by several companies of 
militia. 

The governor of Rhode Island was so much alarmed 
as to call on the President of the United States to af- 
ford him aid, which was declined on the ground that no 
overt act of violence had been committed. The in- 
surgents then elected a separate senate and house of 
representatives, and one Dorr as governor of the State, 
who proceeded to Washington, and had an interview 
with the President of the United States and with several 
members of congress. Meanwhile military preparations 
were making on both sides. A second appeal w^as made 
in vain by the State of Rhode Island for aid from the 
federal government at Washington. Meetings of sym- 
pathizers were held at New York to co-operate with the 



120 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

popular party, who had now obtained some pieces of 
cannon, and attempted to get possession of the arsenal 
at Providence. On this occasion, however, the State 
government called out the militia, who mustered in 
great force, and, after a bloodless affray, the popular 
party, which had already dwindled down to a few hun- 
dreds, deserted their leader. Dorr. This champion 
made his escape, but was soon after taken, tried for 
high treason, and condemned to imprisonment. Be- 
fore the conclusion of this affair the government at 
Washington signified their readiness to furnish the re- 
quired troops, but their offer of aid came late, and the 
assistance was no longer needed. 

The firmness of the Rhode Island legislature under 
the threats of the armed populace at home, and, what 
was more formidable, of the sympathizers from with- 
out, and the respect shown to constitutional forms by 
the mass of the people in the midst of this excitement, 
are circumstances highly creditable to the majority of 
the citizens. It remains to be seen whether an exten- 
sion of the suffrage, which was afterwards granted, will 
promote or impede the cause of freedom and good gov- 
ernment in this small State. 

May 2, 1842. — We now set out on a tour to the valley 
of the Ohio, and the country west of the Alleghany 
mountains, taking the railway to Providence, and a 
steam-boat thence to New York. Afterwards we went 
to Philadelphia by Amboy, passing through the beauti- 
ful straits which sep-arate the mainland of New Jersey 
from Staten Island. The winding channel is, in parts. 



LYELUS TRAVELS 121 

only half a mile and even less in width, with many ele- 
gant villas and country houses on Staten Island. Its 
banks are often well wooded, and it resembles a river, 
or Homer's description of the broad Hellespont, which, 
as Gibbon observes, the poet had evidently likened to 
a river, and not to an arm of the sea. 

The trees in New England are now only beginning 
(in the first week of May) to unfold their leaves, after 
an unusually mild winter. They remain leafless for 
nearly seven months in the year, although in latitude 
42 and 43 N., corresponding geographically to Southern 
Italy. In New Jersey the scarlet maple is putting forth 
its young leaves; the horse-chestnuts and lime-trees are 
in bloom; the lilacs flowering in the gardens, and the 
Judas tree conspicuous .with its purplish pink blossom. 
The dogwood also abounds in the forests, with such a 
display of white flowers as to take the place of our 
hawthorn. 

We reached Philadelphia without fatigue in less than 
twenty-two hours, a distance of 300 miles from Boston, 
having slept on board the steam-boat between Stoning- 
ton (Connecticut) and New York. We proceeded from 
Philadelphia to Baltimore, and from thence ascended 
the beautiful valley of the Patapsco, for 60 miles to 
Frederick. At Harper's Ferry, in Virginia, the Poto- 
mac, about fifty miles above Washington, is joined by 
the Shenandoah, a river as large as itself, and after 
uniting, they issue through a transverse gorge in the 
mountains. This gorge interested me from its exact 
resemblance to the Lehigh Gap, in Pennsylvania, by 



122 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

which the Delaware flows out from the hilly country. 
The scenery of Harper's Ferry has been overpraised, 
but is very picturesque. 

I had hired a carriage at Frederick to carry me to 
Harper's Ferry, and thence to Hagerstown, on the main 
road across the mountains. When I paid the driver, he 
told me that one of my dollar notes was bad, "a mere 
personal note." I asked him to explain, when he told 
me that he had issued such notes himself. ''A friend 
of mine at Baltimore," he said, ''who kept an oyster 
store, once proposed to me to sign twenty-five such 
notes, promising that if I would eat out their value in 
oysters, he would circulate them. They all passed, and 
we never heard of them again." I asked how he recon- 
ciled this transaction to his conscience? He replied, 
that their currency was in a very unsound state, all 
the banks having suspended cash payment, and their 
only hope was that matters would soon become so. bad 
that they must begin to mend. In short, it appeared 
that he and his friend had done their best to hasten on 
so desirable a crisis. 

The next day two Marylanders, one of them the driver 
of the stage coach, declared that if the State should im- 
pose a property tax, thay would resist payment. As 
funds are now wanted to pay the dividends on the 
public debt, the open avowal of such opinions in a 
country where all have votes, sounded in my ears as 
of ominous import. 

In our passage over the Alleghanies, we now followed 
what is called the National Road to Cumberland and 



LYELUS TRAVELS 123 

Frostburg, crossing a great succession of parallel ridges, 
long and unbroken, with narrow intervening valleys, 
the whole clothed with wood, chiefly oak. The dog- 
wood, with its white flowers, was very conspicuous. 
The north-western slopes of the hills were covered with 
the azalea in full flower, of every shade, from a pale pink 
to a deep crimson. They are called here the wild honey- 
suckle. Had not my attention been engrossed with the 
examination of the geological structure of the numerous 
parallel chains, the scenery would have been very mo- 
notonous, the outline of each long ridge being so even 
and unbroken, and there being so great a want in this 
chain of a dominant ridge. There is a remarkable ab- 
sence of ponds or lakes among these mountains, nor 
do we see any of those broad, dead flats so common 
in other chains, especially the Pyrenees, which seem to 
indicate the place of ancient lakes filled up with sedi- 
ment. Another peculiarity, also, of a negative kind, 
is the entire absence of the boulder formation, or drift 
with transported blocks, which forms so marked a 
feature in the hills and valleys of New England. 

Having one day entered a stage coach in our passage 
over these mountains, I conversed with two Kentucky 
farmers returning in high spirits from Baltimore, where 
they had sold all their mules and cattle for good prices. 
They were carrying back their money in heavy bags 
of specie, paper dollars being no longer worthy of trust. 
They said their crops of grain had been so heavy for 
several seasons, that it would have cost too much to 
drag it over the hills to a market 400 miles distant, so 



124 LYELUS TRAVELS 

they had ''given it legs by turning it into mules." I 
asked why not horses. They said mules were nearly as 
serviceable, and lived longer, coming in for a share of 
the longevity of the ass. During several days of travel- 
ling in public conveyances on this line of route, we met 
with persons in all ranks of life, but with no instance of 
rude or coarse manners. 

Entering a cottage at Frostburg, we talked with the 
mother of the famih^ surrounded by her children and 
grandchildren. She appeared prosperous, had left Ire- 
land forty years before, at the age of seventeen, yet 
could not speak of the old country without emotion, 
saying, "she should die happy could she but once more 
see the Cove of Cork." Her children will be more for- 
tunate, as their early associations are all American. 

We passed many waggons of emigrants from Penn- 
sylvania, of German origin, each encumbered with a 
huge, heavy mahogany press, or "schrank," which had 
once, perhaps, come from Westphalia. These antique 
pieces of furniture might well contain the penates of 
these poor people, or be themselves their household 
gods, as they seem to be as religiously preserved. Our 
companions, the two farmers from Kentucky before 
mentioned, shook their heads, remarking, ''that most 
of them would go back again to Pennsylvania, after 
spending all their money in the West; for the old people 
will pine for their former homes, and persuade the 
younger ones to return with them. 

I found some of the iron mines near Frostburg in a 
bankrupt state, and met a long train of luggage wag- 



LYELUS TRAVELS 125 

gons conveying the familes of the work-people to new 
settlements in the West. The disappointed specula- 
tors are clamouring for a tariff to protect their trade 
against English competition. When I urged the usual 
arguments in favour of free trade, I was amused to 
perceive how the class interests of my new companions 
had overcome the usual love of equality, which dis- 
plays itself in the citizens of the United States. One 
of the superintendents of the mines expressed surprise 
that I should have gone through so many States, and 
not grown tired of the dull mediocrity of income which 
mere land under the custom of equal division among 
children produced! ''Why Hmit our civilization and 
refinement to small farmers, who expend their surplus 
gains in tobacco and lawsuits, and can never make 
ample fortunes, such as spring from manufacturing 
and commercial industry?" 



CHAPTER XV 

Alleghany Mountains — Union — Horizontal Coal Formations — 
Brownsville on the Monongahela — Facilities of Working Coal — 
Navigable Rivers — Great Future Resources of the Country — Pitts- 
burg — Fossil Indian Corn — Indian Mounds near Wheeling — Gen- 
eral Harrison on their high Antiquity — Dr. Morton on the aborig- 
inal Indians — Remarks on the Civilization of the Mexicans and 
other Tribes — Marietta — New Settlements — Cincinnati. 

After leaving the small mining village of Frostburg, 
which is about 1500 feet above the level of the sea, we 
continued to ascend and descend a succession of steep 
ridges till we came to the summit level, where the cli- 
mate was sensibly colder, and the oaks and other trees 
still leafless. At Smithfield we crossed a river flowing 
westward, or toward the Monongahela and Gulf of 
Mexico, and soon afterwards passed the grave of Gen- 
eral Braddock, and followed the line of his disastrous 
march toward Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburg. 

At length we reached Laurel Hill, so called from its 
rhododendrons, the last of the great parallel ridges of 
the Alleghanies. From this height we looked down 
upon a splendid prospect, the low undulating country 
to the west, appearing spread out far and wide before 
us, and glowing with the rays of the setting sun. At 
our feet lay the small town of Union, its site being 

12G 



LYELVS TRAVELS 127 

marked by a thin cloud of smoke, which pleased us by 
recalling to our minds a familiar feature in the English 
landscape, not seen in our tour through the regions 
where they burn anthracite, to the east of the Alle- 
ghanies. 

After enjoying the view for some time we began to 
descend rapidly, and at every step saw the forest, so 
leafless and wintry a few hours before, recover its foli- 
age, till the trees and the climate spoke again of spring. 
I had passed several times over the Pyrenees and the 
Alps, and witnessed the changes of vegetation between 
the opposite flanks, or between the summits and base 
of those mountains; but this was the first time I had 
crossed a great natural barrier, and found on the other 
side people speaking the same language, and having pre- 
cisely the same laws and political institutions. 

At the town of Union, which may be said to lie at 
the western foot of the mountains, I had an opportunity 
of seeing coal exposed to view in an open quarry of 
building stone. The coal seam was three and a half 
feet thick, with an intervening layer, as usual, between 
it and the freestone of dark slate or shale, four feet 
thick. When traced farther, the shale thinned out 
gradually, and in a neighbouring quarry, about thirty 
yards distant, it gave place to the yellow micaceous 
sandstone, which then formed the roof of the coal. 
These sandstone roofs are comparatively rare in Amer- 
ica, as in Europe. 

From Union, we went to Brownsville on the Monon- 
gahela, a large tributary of the Ohio, where the country 



128 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

consists of coal measures, like those at Union, both 
evidently belonging to the same series as those more 
bent and cm-ved beds at Frostburg. I was truly as- 
tonished, now that I had entered the hydrographical 
basin of the Ohio, at beholding the richness of the seams 
of coal, which appear everywhere on the flanks of the 
hills and at the bottom of the valleys, and which are 
accessible in a degree I never witnessed elsewhere. The 
time has not yet arrived, the soil being still densely 
covered with the primeval forest, and manufacturing 
industry in its infancy, when the full value of this in- 
exhaustible supply of cheap fuel can be appreciated; 
but the resources which it will one day afford to a re- 
gion capable, by its agricultural produce alone, of sup- 
porting a large population, are truly magnificent. In 
order to estimate the natural advantages of such a re- 
gion, we must reflect how three great navigable rivers, 
such as the Monongahela, Alleghany, and Ohio, in- 
tersect it, and lay open on their banks the level seams 
of coal. I found at Brownsville a bed ten feet thick 
of good bituminous coal, commonly called the Pitts- 
burg seam, breaking out in the river cliffs near the 
water's edge. Horizontal galleries may be driven every- 
where at very slight expense, and so worked as to drain 
themselves, while the cars, laden with coal and at- 
tached to each other, glide down on a railway, so as to 
deliver their burdens into barges moored to the river's 
bank. The same seam is seen at a distance, on the 
right bank, and may be followed the whole way to 
Pittsburg, fifty miles distant. As it is nearly horizontal, 



LYELUS TRAVELS 129 

while the river descends, it crops out at a continually 
increasing, but never at an inconvenient, height above 
the Monongahela. Below the great bed of coal at 
Brownsville is a fire-clay eighteen inches thick, and be- 
low this, several beds of limestone, below which again 
are other seams. Almost every proprietor can open a 
coal-pit on his own land, and, the stratification being 
very regular, they may calculate with precision the 
depth at which the coal may be won. 

So great are the facilities for procuring this excellent 
fuel, that already it is found profitable to convey it in 
flat-bottomed boats for the use of steamships at New 
Orleans, 1100 miles distant, in spite of the dense 
forests bordering the intermediate river-plains, where 
timber may be obtained at the cost of felling it. But 
no idea can be formed of the importance of these Amer- 
ican coal-seams, until we reflect on the prodigious area 
over which they are continuous. The boundaries of the 
Pittsburg seam have been determined with accuracy by 
the Professors Rogers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and 
Ohio, and they have found the elliptical area which it 
occupies to be 225 miles in its longest diameter, while its 
maximum breadth is about one hundred miles, its 
superficial extent being about fourteen thousand square 
miles. While alluding to the vast area of these carbon- 
iferous formations in the United States, so rich in 
productive coal, I may call attention to the Illinois 
coal-field. That coal-field, comprehending parts of Il- 
linois, Indiana and Kentucky, is not much inferior in 
dimensions to the whole of England, and consists of 



130 LYELUS TRAVELS 

horizontal strata, with numerous rich seams of bitumi- 
nous coal. 

May 15, 1842. — We embarked at Brownsville for 
Pittsburg in a long narrow steamer, which drew only 
eighteen inches of water, and had a single paddle be- 
hind like the overshot wheel of a mill. It threw up a 
shower of spray like a fountain, which had a picturesque 
effect. The iron works of the machinery and the 
furnace were all exposed to view, and the engineers 
were on deck in a place cooled by the free circulation 
of air. 

The wooded hills rise to the height of from 300 to 450 
feet above the river between Brownsville and Pitts- 
burg. The latter place is situated at the junction of the 
Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, which after their 
union form the Ohio. It is a most flourishing town, 
and we counted twenty-two large steamboats anchored 
off the wharfs. From the summit of the hill, 460 feet 
high, on the left bank of the Monongahela, we had a fine 
view of Pittsburg, partially concealed by the smoke of 
its numerous factories. A great many fine bridges span 
the two broad rivers above their junction. In the same 
hill I saw a fine section of the hori/^ontal coal-measures. 
Far below the principal seam, and near the level of the 
river, there is a bed of coal a few inches thick, resting 
on clay. 

The steamboats on the Ohio cannot be depended 
upon for punctual departure at the appointed hour like 
those of the Hudson or Delaware. I therefore took 
places in a coach for Wheeling, and crossed a low and 



LYELUS TRAVELS 131 

nearly level country, where I was struck with the 
absence of drift and boulders, so common in the north. 
The carboniferous strata were exposed on the banks of 
every small streamlet, and not concealed by any super- 
ficial covering. On reaching one of those innumerable 
towns to which, as if for the sake of confusion, the name 
of Washington has been given, I received the agreeable 
intelligence that, instead of travelling to Wheeling be- 
fore sunset, I must wait till another mail came up in 
the middle of the night. I was very indignant at this 
breach of promise, but was soon appeased by the good- 
natured landlord and postmaster, who addressed me 
by the conciliatory appellation of ''Major," and as- 
sured me that the new post-ofhce regulation was as 
inconvenient to him as it could possibly be to us. 

The next day we embarked at Wheeling on the Ohio 
for Marietta. I had been requested by my geological 
friends, when at Philadelphia, to make inquiries re- 
specting some Indian corn said to have been found 
fossil at some depth in a stratified deposit near Fish 
Creek, a tributary of the Ohio, and presumed to be of 
high antiquity. A proprietor who had resided twenty- 
six years near the spot, assured me that the corn oc- 
curred in an island in the river, at the depth of no more 
than two feet below the surface of the alluvial soil. It 
consisted of parched corn, such as the Indians often 
buried when alarmed, and in the present year the Ohio 
had risen so high as to inundate the very spot, and 
throw down several layers of mud upon the site of the 
corn. 



132 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

P^ive miles below Wheeling, on the left bank of the 
Ohio, is a terrace of stratified sand and gravel, having 
its surface about seventy-five feet alcove the Ohio. On 
this terrace is seen a large Indian mound. On arriving 
at Marietta, I learnt from Dr. Hildreth that skeletons 
had been found in it at various depths, together with 
pipe-heads and other ornaments. Their workmanship 
implies a more advanced state of the arts than that 
attained by the rude Indians who inhabited this fertile 
valley when it was first discovered by the white man. 
There are many other similar mounds in the valleys 
of the Ohio and its tributaries, but no tradition con- 
cerning their origin. One of these, near Marietta, in 
which human bones were dug up, must be more than 
eight centuries old, for Dr. Hildreth counted eight 
hundred rings of annual growth in a tree which grew 
upon it. But, however high may be the historical an- 
tiquity of the mounds, they stand on alluvial terraces 
which are evidently of a very modern geological date. 
In America, as in Europe, the oldest monuments of 
human labour are as things of yesterday in comparison 
with the effects of physical causes which were in oper- 
ation after the existing continents had acquired the 
leading features of hill and valley, river and lake, which 
now belong to them. Dr. Locke of Cincinnati has 
shown that one of the earth-works, enclosing about one 
hundred acres on the great Miami, although nearly 
entire, has been overflowed in a few places, and par- 
tially obliterated. He infers from this and other facts, 
that these mounds extending to high-water mark, and 



LYELUS TRAVELS 133 

liable to be occasionally submerged, were constructed 
when the streams had already reached their present 
levels, or, in other words, their channels have not been 
deepened in the last 1000 or 2000 years. 

The arguments for assigning a very remote period to 
the Indian antiquities above alluded to, have been 
stated with great force and clearness by General Harri- 
son, late President of the United States, who was prac- 
tically versed in woodcraft, and all that relates to the 
clearing of new lands. In his essay on the aborigines of 
the Ohio valley, he states that some of these earth- 
works are not mere mounds, but extensive lines of 
embankment, varying from a few feet to ninety feet in 
altitude, and enclosing areas of from one to several 
hundred acres. 

''Their sites," he says, ''present precisely the same 
appearance as the circumjacent forest. You find on 
them all that beautiful variety of trees which give such 
unrivalled richness to our forests. This is particularly 
the case on the fifteen acres included within the walls 
of the work at the mouth of the great Miami, and the 
relative proportions of the different kinds of timber are 
about the same." 

He then goes on to observe that if you cut down the 
wood on any piece of wild land, and abandon it to 
nature, the trees do not grow up as before, but one or 
two, or at most three species get possession of the 
whole ground, such for example as the yellow locust, 
or the black and white walnut. The process by which 
the forest recovers its original state is extremely slow. 



134 LYELUS TRAVELS 

''On a farm of my own," says he, ''at the end of fifty 
years, so little progress had been made, as to show that 
ten times that period would be necessary to effect its 
complete assimilation. When those kinds of timber 
which first establish themselves have for a long time re- 
mained undisputed masters of the soil, they at length 
die by disease, or are thinned by the lightning or 
tempest. The soil has no longer a preference for them, 
and by a natural rotation of crops other species succeed, 
till at length the more homogeneous growth ceases, and 
the denuded tract is again clothed with a variety of 
wood." As the sites of the earthworks command ex- 
tensive views, it is reasonable to infer that no trees 
were suffered by the Indians to spring up upon and 
near the mounds, from the state of the surrounding 
forest. General Harrison concludes that several gen- 
erations of trees had succeeded each other, before the 
present trees began to grow, and that the mounds were 
probably as ancient at least as the Christian era. 
The rich valley of the Ohio, when first discovered by 
Europeans, was thinly peopled by rude tribes of Indian 
hunters. In what manner, then, could they have con- 
quered and driven out that more civilized race which 
evidently preceded them? Harrison suggests that a 
great flood, like those which occurred in 1793 and 1832 
after heavy rain, when the Ohio was unusually blocked 
up with ice, may have swept off Indian towns and vil- 
lages, and caused the terrified occupants to remove. 
The flood would be construed by their superstition into 
a warning from heaven to seek a residence upon some 



LYELL\S TRAVELS 135 

smaller streams; and before the remembrance of this 
fearful calamity had been effaced from their imagin- 
ations, the deserted region would, from its great fer- 
tility, become the usual resort of game. It would then 
be a common hunting ground for the hostile tribes of 
the north and south, and consequently a great arena 
for battle. In this state it continued when first visited 
by the whites. 

Dr. Morton, in his luminous and philosophical essay 
on the aboriginal race of America, seems to have proved 
that all the different tribes, except the Esquimaux, are 
of one race, and that this race is peculiar and distinct 
from all others. The physical characteristics of the 
Fuegians, the Indians of the tropical plains, those of 
the Rocky Mountains, and of the great valley of the 
Mississippi, are the same, not only in regard to feature 
and external lineaments, but also in osteological struc- 
ture. After comparing nearly 400 crania derived from 
tribes inhabiting almost every region of both Americas, 
Dr. Morton has found the same pecuHar shape pervad- 
ing all, " the squared or rounded head, the flattened 
or vertical occiput, the high cheek bones, the ponderous 
maxillae, the large quadrangular orbits, and the low 
receding forehead." The oldest skulls from the ceme- 
teries of Peru, the tombs of Mexico, or the mounds of 
the Mississippi and Ohio, agree with each other, and 
are of the same type as the heads of the most savage 
existing tribes. If we next turn to their arts and inven- 
tions, we find that a canoe excavated from a single log 
was the principal vessel in use thrx)ughQut the New 



136 LYELUS TRAVELS 

World at the period of its discovery, the same primitive 
model existing among the 'Fuegians, the predatory 
Caribs, and the more advanced Mexicans and Peru- 
vians. 

But although the various tribes remained in general 
as stationary in all matters requiring intellectual effort, 
as in their nautical contrivances, we behold with sur- 
prise certain points of which Mexico was the most 
remarkable, where an indigenous and peculiar civili- 
zation had been developed, and had reached a high 
degree of perfection. How^ever much we may admire 
their architecture, their picture-writing, and historical 
records, it is their astronomical science in particular, 
as Mr. Prescott observes, which was disproportioned 
to their advancement in other walks of civilization. 
They had fixed the true length of the tropical ^ year 
wuth a precision unknown to the great philosophers of 
antiquity, which could only be the result of a long series 
of nice and patient observations. By intercalating a 
certain number of days into the year at the expiration 
of every fifty-two years, they had even anticipated the 
Gregorian reform, so that their calendar at the time of 
the conquest was more correct than that of the Euro- 
peans. To ascribe the civilization of the Toltecs to an 
Asiatic origin, while it is admitted that there was no 
correspondence or relationship between their language 
and that of any known Asiatic nation, appears to me a 
baseless hypothesis, however true it may be that the 
aboriginal Americans had in the course of ages derived 
some hints from foreign sources. They could only have 



LYELUS TRAVELS 137 

taken advantage of such aid, conjectural as it is, and 
without proof, if they were ah-eady in a highly progres- 
sive state; and if such assistance be deemed sufficient 
to invalidate their title to an independent civilization, 
no race of mankind can ever make good their claim to 
such an honor. 

If, then, a large continent can be inhabited by 
hundreds of tribes, all belonging to the same race, and 
nearly all remaining for centuries in a state of appar- 
ently hopeless barbarism, while two or three of them 
make a start in their social condition, and in the arts 
and sciences; if these same nations, when brought into 
contact with Europeans, relapse and retrograde until 
they are scarcely distinguishable in intellectual rank 
from the rude hunter tribes descended from a common 
stock; what caution ought we to observe when specu- 
lating on the inherent capacities of any other great 
member of the human family? The negro, for ex- 
ample, may have remained stationary in all hitherto 
explored parts of the African continent, and may even 
have become more barbarous when brought within the 
influence of the white man, and yet may possess within 
his bosom the germ of a civilization as active and re- 
fined as that of the golden age of Tezcuco. 

We were fortunate, when at Pomeroy, to fall in with 
some New England settlers, who were nearly related to 
several of our most valued friends at Boston. Their 
descriptions of what they had gone through since they 
first founded this flourishing colony in the wilderness, 
reminded us of that entertaining volume recently pub- 



138 LYELUS TRAVELS 

lished in the United States, called ''A New Home: 
Who'll Follow?" It is not the trees and their rank 
growth on the uncleared land, nor the wild animals, 
which are the most uncongenial neighbours to persons 
of superior education and refinement in a new settle- 
ment. To enjoy facilities, therefore, of communicating 
rapidly with the civilized Eastern States by founding 
their new town on the banks of a great navigable river, 
or close to some main road in the interior, is a privilege 
truly enviable. I remember wondering, when I first 
read Homer's graphic sketch of the advantages of 
wealth, that he should have placed his rich man's 
mansion on the road side. 

To an Englishman, the poet's notion seemed very un- 
aristocratic, for we are almost irresistibly reminded of 
the large sums which an English country gentleman 
would expend in order to remove the high road to a 
respectful distance. Probably the present condition of 
Ohio, rather than that of a county of parks and man- 
sions like Surrey, was the model most frequently pres- 
ent to the minds of the migratory Greeks of the Homeric 
age. 

From Pomeroy, a large steamboat carried us more 
than 200 miles in about fifteen hours, down the broad, 
winding stream, past many a well-wooded island, to 
Cincinnati, where we were struck with the appearance 
of commercial activity, the numerous wharfs and steam 
boats, the wide streets and handsome buildings.^ 



CHAPTER XVII 

Excursion to the Swamps of Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky — Noble 
Forest — Salt Springs — Buffalo Trails — Numerous Bones of Ex- 
tinct Animals. 

Two days after I reached Cincinnati, I set out, in 
company with two naturaHsts of that city, Mr. Bu- 
chanan and Mr. J. G. Anthony, who kindly offered to 
be my guides, in an excursion to a place of great geo- 
logical celebrity in the neighbouring State of Kentucky, 
called Big Bone Lick, where the bones of mastodons 
and many other extinct quadrupeds have been dug 
up in extraordinary abundance. Having crossed the 
river from Cincinnati, we passed through a forest far 
more magnificent for the size and variety of its trees 
than any we had before seen. The tulip-tree, the buck- 
eye, a kind of horse-chestnut, the shagbark hickory, 
the beech, the oak, the elm, the chestnut, the locust- 
tree, the sugar-maple, and the willow, were in perfection 
but no coniferous trees, — none of the long-leaved pines 
of the Southern Atlantic, border, nor the cypress, cedar, 
and hemlock of other States. These forests, where 
there is no undergrowth, are called 'Svood pastures." 
Originally the cane covered the ground, but when it 
was eaten down by the cattle, no new crop could get up, 
and it was replaced by grass alone 

139 



140 LYELL'S TRAVELS 

Big Bone Lick is distant from Cincinnati about 
twenty-three miles in a S. W. direction. The interven- 
ing country is composed of the blue argillaceous lime- 
stone and marl, the beds of which are nearly horizontal, 
and form flat table-lands intersected by valleys of 
moderate depth. In one of these, watered by the Big 
Bone Creek, occur the boggy grounds and springs called 
Licks. The term Lick is applied throughout North 
America to those marshy swamps where saline springs 
break out, and which are frequented by deer, buffalo, 
and other wild animals for the sake of the salt, whether 
dissolved in the water, or thrown down by evaporation 
in the summer season, so as to encrust the surface of the 
marsh. Cattle and wild beasts devour this encrustation 
greedily, and burrow into the clay impregnated with 
salt, in order to lick the mud. Bartram, the botanist, 
tells us, that in his time (1790) he visited Buffalo Lick 
in Georgia, forming part of a cane swamp, in which 
the head branches of the Ogeechee River take their rise. 
The lick consisted of "white-coloured tenacious fattish 
clay, which all kinds of cattle lick into great hollows, 
pursuing the delicious vein." ^' I could discover nothing 
saline in its taste, but an insipid sweetness. Horned 
cattle, horses, and deer are immoderately fond of it." 
The celebrated bog of Kentucky is situated in a 
nearly level plain, in a valley bounded by gentle slopes, 
which lead up to the table-lands before mentioned. 
The general course of the meandering stream which 
flows through the plain, is from east to west. There are 
two sprii]gs on the southern or left bank, rising from 



LY ELL'S TRAVELS 141 

marshes, and two on the opposite bank, the most 
western of which, called the Gum Lick, is at the point 
where a small tributary joins the principal stream. 
The quaking bogs on this side are now more than fif- 
teen acres in extent, but all the marshes were for- 
merly larger before the surrounding forest was partially 
cleared away. The removal of tall trees has allow^ed 
the sun's rays to penetrate freely to the soil, and dry up 
part of the morass. 

Within the memory of persons now^ living, the wild 
bisons or buffaloes crowded to these springs, but they 
have retreated for many years, and are now as unknown 
to the inhabitants as the mastodon itself. Mr. Phinnel, 
the proprietor of the land, called our attention to two 
buffalo paths or trails still extant in the woods here, 
both leading directly to the springs. One of these in 
particular, which first strikes off in a northerly direc- 
tion from the Gum Lick, is afterwards traced eastward 
through the forest for several miles. It was three or 
four yards wide, only partially overgrown with grass, 
and, sixty years ago, was as bare, hard, and well trod- 
den as a high road. 

The bog in the spots where the salt springs rise is so 
soft, that a man may force a pole down into it many 
yards perpendicularly. It may readily be supposed, 
therefore, that horses, cows, and other quadrupeds, 
are now occasionally lost here; and that a much greater 
number of wild animals w^ere mired formerly. It is 
well known that, during great droughts in the Pampas 
of South America, the horses, cattle, and deer throng 



142 LYELUS TRAVELS 

to the rivers in such numbers that the foremost of the 
crowd are pushed into the stream by the pressure of 
others behind, and are sometimes carried away by 
thousands and drowned. In their eagerness to drink 
the saline waters and lick the salt, the heavy mastodons 
and elephants seem in like manner to have pressed upon 
each other, and sunk in these soft quagmires of Ken- 
tucky. 

The greater proportion l^oth of the entire skeletons 
of extinct animals, and the separate bones, have been 
taken up from black mud, about twelve feet below the 
level of the creek. It is supposed that the bones of 
mastodons found here could not have belonged to less 
than one hundred distinct individuals, those of the 
fossil elephant to twenty, besides which, a few bones of 
a stag, horse, megalonyx, and bison, are stated to have 
been obtained. Whether the common bison, the re- 
mains of which I saw in great numbers in a superficial 
stratum recently cut open in the river's bank, has ever 
been seen in such a situation as to prove it to have been 
contemporaneous with the extinct mastodon, I was 
unable to ascertain. In regard to the horse, it may 
prol3al)ly have differed from our Equus cahallus ^ as 
much as the zebra or wild ass, in the same manner as 
that found at Newl:)erne in North Carolina appears to 
have done. The greatest depth of the black mud has 
not been ascertained; it is composed chiefly of clay, 
with a mixture of calcareous matter and sand, and con- 
tains 5 parts in 100 of sulphate of lime, with some ani- 
mal matter. Layers of gravel occur in the midst of it at 



LYELUS TRAVELS 143 

various depths. In some places it rests upon the blue 
limestone. The only teeth which I myself procured 
from collectors on the spot, besides those of the buffalo, 
were recognized by Mr. Owen as belonging to extremely 
young mastodons. From the place where they were 
found, and the rolled state of some of the accompany- 
ing bones, I suspected that they had been washed out 
of the soil of the bogs above by the river, which often 
changes its course after floods. 

It is impossible to view this plain, without at once 
concluding that it has remained unchanged in all its 
principal features from the period when the extinct 
quadrupeds inhabited the banks of the Ohio and its 
tributaries. But one phenomenon perplexed us much, 
and for a time seemed quite unintelligible. On parts of 
the boggy grounds, a superficial covering of yellow loam 
was incumbent on the dark-coloured mud, containing 
the fossil bones. This partial covering of y-ellow sandy 
clay was at some points no less than fifteen or twenty 
feet thick. Mr. Bullock passed through it when he dug 
for fossil remains on the left bank of the creek, and he 
came down to the boggy grounds with bones below. 
We first resorted to the hypothesis that the valley 
might have been dammed up by a temporary barrier, 
and converted into a lake; but we afterwards learnt, 
that although the Ohio is seven miles distant by the 
windings of the creek, there being a slight descent the 
whole way, yet that great river has been known to rise 
so high as to flow up the valley of Big Bone Creek, and 
so late as 1824, to enter the second story of a house 



144 LYELUS TRAVELS 

built near the springs. The level of the Licks above 
the Ohio is about fifty feet, the distance in a straight 
line being only three miles. At Cincinnati the river 
has been known to rise sixty feet above its summer 
level, and in the course of ages it may occasionally have 
risen higher. It may be unnecessary, therefore, to refer 
to the general subsidence before alluded to, in order to 
account for the patches of superficial silt last described. 

After spending the day in exploring the Licks, we 
were hospitably received at the house of a Kentucky 
proprietor a few miles distant, whose zeal for farming 
and introducing cattle of the ''true Durham breed," 
had not prevented him from cultivating a beautiful 
flower garden. We were regaled the next morning with 
an excellent dish of broiled squirrels. There are seasons 
when the grey squirrel swarms here in such numbers, 
as to strip the trees of their foliage, and the sportsmen 
revenge themselves after the manner of the Hottentots, 
when they eat the locusts which have consumed every 
green thing in Southern Africa. 

We then returned by another route through the 
splendid forest, and re-crossed the Ohio. The weather 
was cool, and we saw no fire-flies, although I had seen 
many a few days before, sparkling as they flitted over 
the marshy grounds bordering the Ohio, in my excur- 
sion up the river to Rockville. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

Cincinnati — Journey across Ohio to Cleveland — New Clearings — 
Rapid Progress of the State since the year 1800 — Increase of Pop- 
ulation in the United States — Political Discussions — Stump 
Oratory — Relative Value of Labor and Land. 

May 29. — We left Cincinnati for Cleveland on Lake 
Erie, a distance of 250 miles, and our line of route took 
us through the centre of the State of Ohio, by Spring- 
field, Mount Vernon, and Wooster, at all which places 
we slept, reaching Cleveland on the fifth day. 

In our passage through Ohio, we took advantage of 
public coaches only when they offered themselves in 
the day-time, and always found good private carriages 
for the rest of the way. If some writers, who have re- 
cently travelled in this part of America, found the 
fatigue of the journey excessive, it must have arisen 
from their practice of pushing on day and night over 
roads which are in some places really dangerous in the 
dark. On our reaching a steep hill north of Mount 
Vernon, a fellow-passenger pointed out to me a spot 
where the coach had been lately upset in the night. 
He said that in the course of the last three years he had 
been overturned thirteen times between Cincinnati and 
Cleveland, but being an inside passenger had escaped 
without serious injury. 

145 



146 LYELVS TRAVELS 

In passing from the southern to the northern fron- 
tier of Ohio, we left a handsome and populous city and 
fine roads, and found the towns grow smaller and the 
high roads rougher, as we advanced. When more than 
half way across the State, and after leaving Mount 
Vernon, we saw continually new clearings, where the 
felling, girdling, and burning of trees was going on, and 
where oats were growing amidst the blackened stumps 
on land which had never been ploughed, but only 
broken up with the harrow. The carriage was then 
jolted for a short space over a corduroy road, con- 
structed of trunks of trees laid side 1)y side, while the 
hot air of burning timber made us impatient of the slow 
pace of our carriage. We then lost sight for many 
leagues of all human habitations, except here and there 
some empty wooden building, on which ''Mover's 
House" was inscribed in large letters. Here we were 
told a family of emigrants might pass the night on pay- 
ment of a small sum. At last the road again improved, 
and we came to the termination of the table land of 
Ohio, at a distance of about sixteen miles from Lake 
Erie. From this point on the summit of Stony Hill we 
saw at our feet a broad and level plain covered with 
wood; and beyond, in the horizon. Lake Erie, extend- 
ing far and wide like the ocean. We then began our 
descent, and in about three hours reached Cleveland. 

The changes in the conditions of the country which 
we had witnessed are illustrations of the course of events 
which has marked the progress of civilization in this 
State, which first began in the south, and spread from 



LYELUS TRAVELS 147 

the banks of the Ohio. At a later period, when the 
great Erie canal was finished, which opened a free com- 
mercial intercourse with the river Hudson, New York, 
and the Atlantic, the northern frontier began to ac= 
quire w^ealth and an increase of inhabitants. Porte 
were founded on the lake, and grew in a few years v/ith 
almost unparalleled rapidity. The forest then yielded 
to the axe in a new direction, and settlers migrated 
from north to south, leaving still a central wilderness 
between the Ohio and Lake Erie. This forest might 
have proved for many generations a serious obstacle 
to the progress of the State, had not the law wisely 
provided that all non-resident holders of waste lands 
should be compelled to pay their full share of taxes laid 
on by the inhabitants of the surrounding districts for 
new schools and roads. If an absentee is in arrear, the 
sheriff seizes a portion of his ground contiguous to a 
town or village, puts it up for auction, and thus dis- 
charges the debt, so that it is impossible for a specu- 
lator, indifferent to the local interests of a district, to 
wait year after year, until he is induced by a great 
bribe to part with his lands, all ready communication 
between neighbouring and highly cultivated regions 
being in the meantime cut off. 

Ohio was a wilderness exclusively occupied by the 
Indians, until near the close of the last century. In 
1800 its population amounted to 45,365, in the next 
ten years it had increased fivefold, and in the ten which 
followed it again more than doubled. In 1840 it had 
reached 1,600,000 souls, all free, and almost without 



148 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

ixny admixture of the coloured race. In this short in- 
terval the forest had been transformed into a land of 
steamboats, canals, and flourishing towns; and would 
have been still more populous had not thousands of its 
new settlers migrated still farther west to Indiana and 
Illinois. A portion of the public works w^hich acceler- 
ated this marvellous prosperity, were executed w-ith 
foreign capital, but the interest of the whole has been 
punctually paid by direct taxes. There is no other ex- 
ample in history, either in the old or new world, of so 
sudden a rise of a large country to opulence and power. 
The State contains nearly as wdde an extent of arable 
land as England, all of moderate elevation, so rich in 
its alluvial plains as to be cropped thirty or forty years 
without manure, having abundance of fine timber, a 
temperate climate, many large navigable rivers, a ready 
communication through Lake Erie with the north 
and east, and by the Ohio with the south and west, 
and, lastly, abundance of coal in its eastern counties. 

I am informed that, in the beginning of the present 
year (1842), the foremost bands of emigrants have 
reached the Platte River, a tributary of the Missouri. 
This point is said to be only half way between the At- 
lantic and the Rocky Mountains, and the country be- 
yond the present frontier is as fertile as that already 
occupied. De Tocqueville calculated that along the 
borders of the United States, from Lake Superior to 
the Gulf of Mexico, extending a distance of more than 
1200 miles as the bird flies, the whites advance every 
year at a mean rate of seventeen miles; and he truly 



LYELUS TRAVELS 149 

observes that there is a grandeur and solemnity in this 
gradual and continuous march of the European race 
towards the Rocky Mountains. He compares it to '^a 
deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven on- 
wards by the hand of God." 

When conversing with a New England friend on the 
progress of American population, I was surprised to 
learn, as a statistical fact, that there are more whites 
now living in North America than all that have died 
there since the days of Columbus. It seems probable, 
moreover, that the same remark may hold true for 
fifty years to come. The census has been carefully 
taken in the United States since the year 1800, and it 
appears that the ratio of increase was 35 per cent, for 
the first decennial period, and that it gradually di- 
minished to about 32 per cent, in the last. From these 
data, Professor Tucker estimated that, in the year 
1850, the population will amount in round numbers to 
22 millions, in 1860 to 29 millions, in 1870 to 38 mil- 
lions, in 1880 to 50 millions, in 1890 to 63 millions, and 
in 1900 to 80 millions. ^ 

The territory of the United States is said to amount 
to one-tenth, or at the utmost to one-eighth of that 
colonised by Spain on the American continent. Yet in 
all these vast regions conquered by Cortez and Pizarro, 
there are considerably less than two millions of people 
of European blood, so that they scarcely exceed in 
number the population acquired in about half a cen- 
tury in Ohio, and fall far short of it in wealth and 
civilization. 



CHAPTER XIX 

Cleveland — Fredonia; streets lighted with natural Gas — Falls of 
Niagara — Burning Spring — Passing behind the Falls — Daguerre- 
otype of the Falls. 

June 5. — Sailed in a steamboat to Fredonia, a town 
of 1200 inhabitants, with neat white houses, and six 
churches. The streets are lighted up with natural gas, 
which bubbles up out of the ground, and is received 
into a gasometer, which I visited. This gas consists of 
carburetted hydrogen,^ and issues from a black bitu- 
minous slate. The lighthouse-keeper at Fredonia told 
me that, near the shore, at a considerable distance 
from the gasometer, he bored a hole through the black 
slate, and the gas soon collected in sufficient quantity 
to explode, when ignited. 

We next reached Buffalo, and found so many new 
buildings erected since the preceding autumn, and new 
shops opened, that we were amazed at the progress of 
things, at a time when all are complaining of the un- 
precedented state of depression under which the com- 
merce and industry of the country are suffering. 

At the Falls of Niagara, where we next spent a 
week, residing in a hotel on the Canada side, I resumed 
my geological explorations of last summer. Every 
part of the scenery, from Grand Island above the falls 

150 



LYELUS TRAVELS 151 

to the Ferry at Queenstown, seven miles below, de- 
serves to be studied at leisure. 

We visited the ''burning spring" at the edge of the 
river above the rapids, v/here carburetted hydrogen, 
or, in the modern chemical phraseology, a light hydro- 
carbon, similar to that before mentioned at Fredonia, 
rises from beneath the water out of tl:ke limestone rock. 
The invisible gas makes its way in countless bubbles 
through the clear transparent waters of the Niagara. 
On the appHcation of a lighted candle, it takes fire, and 
plays about with a lambent flickering flame, which 
seldom touches the water, the gas being at first too 
pure to be inflammable, and only obtaining sufficient 
oxygen after mingling with the atmosphere at the 
height of several inches above the surface of the stream. 

At noon, on a hot summer's day, we were tempted, 
contrary to my previous resolution, to perform the 
exploit of passing under the great sheet of water be- 
tween the precipice and the Horse-shoe Fall. We 
were in some degree rewarded for this feat by the sin- 
gularity of the scene, and the occasional openings in 
the curtain of white foam and arch of green water, 
which afforded momentary glimpses of the woody ra- 
vine and river below, fortunately for us lighted up 
most brilUantly by a midday sun. We had only one 
guide, which is barely sufficient for safety when there 
are two persons, for a stranger requires support when 
he loses his breath by the violent gusts of wind dashing 
the spray and water in his face. If he turns round to 
recover, the blast often changes in an instant, and 



152 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

blows as impetuously against him in the opposite di- 
rection. 

The Falls, though continually in motion, have all 
the effect of a fixed and unvarying feature in the land- 
scape, like the two magnificent fountains in the great 
court before St. Peter's at Rome, which seem to form 
as essential a part of one architectural whole as the 
stately colonnade, or the massive dome itself. How- 
ever strange, therefore, it may seem, some Daguerreo- 
type ^ representations of the Falls have been executed 
with no small success. They not only record the form 
of the rocks and islands, but even the leading features 
of the cataract, and the shape of the clouds of spray. 
I often wished that Father Hennepin ^ could have 
taken one of these portraits, and bequeathed it to the 
geologists of our times. It would have afforded us no 
slight aid in our speculations respecting the compara- 
tive state of the ravine in the 19th and 17th centuries. 

After one or two warm days, the weather became 
unusually cold for the month of June, with occasional 
frosts at night, and the humming-birds which we had 
seen before reaching Buffalo appeared no more during 
our stay here. 



CHAPTER XX 

Mirage on Lake Ontario — Toronto — Excursion with Mr. Roy — 
Rapid Progress of the Colony — British Settlers unable to speak 
English. 

June 14, 1842. — From Queenstown we embarked in 
a fine steamer for Toronto, and had scarcely left the 
mouth of the river, and entered Lake Ontario, when 
we were surprised at seeing Toronto in the horizon, and 
the low wooded plain on which the town is built. By 
the effect of refraction, or '^ mirage," so common on 
this lake, the houses and trees were drawn up and 
lengthened vertically, so that I should have guessed 
them to be from 200 to 400 feet high, while the gently 
rising ground behind the town had the appearance of 
distant mountains. In the ordinary state of the atmos- 
phere none of this land, much less the city, would be 
visible at this distance, even in the clearest weather. 

Toronto contains already a population of 18,000 
souls. The plain on which it stands has a gentle, and 
to the eye imperceptible, slope upwards from the lake, 
and is still covered for the most part, with a dense 
forest, which is beginning to give way before the axe 
of the new settler. I found Mr. Roy, the civil engineer, 
expecting me, and started with him the morning after 
my arrival, 

153 



154 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

In my ride with Mr. Roy through the forest we went 
about twenty miles due north of Toronto, besides 
making many detours. A more active scene of the 
progress of a new colony could scarcely be witnessed. 
We often came upon a party of surveyors, or pioneers, 
tracing out a new line of road with the trunks of tall 
trees felled on every side, over which we had to leap 
our horses. Then we made a circuit to get to wind- 
ward of some large stumps which were on fire, or, if we 
could find no pathway, hurried our steeds through the 
smoke, half suffocated and oppressed with the heat of 
the burning timber and a sultry sun. Sometimes we 
emerged suddenly into a wide clearing, where not a 
single clump of trees had been spared by the impatient 
and improvident farmer. All were burnt, not even a 
shrub remaining for the cattle and sheep, which, for 
want of a better retreat were gasping under the im- 
perfect shade of a wooden paling, called in America a 
Virginia, or snake fence. 

The appearance of the country had been so entirely 
altered since Mr. Roy surveyed the ground two years 
before, and marked out the boundaries of the new 
settlements, that he lost his way while explaining to 
me the geology of ''the ridges"; and after we had been 
on horseback for twelve hours we wandered about in 
a bright moonlight, unable to find the tavern where 
we hoped to pass the night. In the darker shade of the 
forest I saw many fire-flies; and my attention was kept 
alive, in spite of fatigue, by stories of men and horses 
swallowed up in some of the morasses which we crossed. 



LYELUS TRAVELS 155 

I shall always, in future, regard a corduroy road with 
respect, as marking a great step in the march of civ- 
ihzation; for greatly were we rejoiced when we dis- 
covered in the moonlight the exact part of a bog, over 
which a safe bridge of this kind had been laid down. 
At length we reached a log-house, and thought our 
troubles at an end. But the inmates, though eager to 
serve us, could not comprehend a syllable of our lan- 
guage. I tried English, French, and German, all in 
vain. Tired and disappointed, we walked to another 
log-house, a mile farther on, leading our weary horses, 
and then to others, but with no better success. Though 
not among Indians, we were as foreigners in a strange 
land. At last we stumbled, by good luck, upon our 
inn, and the next day were told that the poor settlers 
with whom we had fallen in the night before had all 
come from the British Isles in the course of the five 
preceding years. Some of them could speak Gaelic, 
others Welsh, and others Irish; and the farmers were 
most eloquent in descanting on their misfortune in 
having no alternative but that of employing labourers 
with whom they were unable to communicate, or re- 
maining in want of hands while so many were out of 
work, and in great distress. For the first time I be- 
came fully aware how much the success and progress 
of a new colony depends on the state of schools in the 
mother country. 



CHAPTER XXI 

Kingston — Montreal — Frencli Population and Language — Que- 
bec — Burlington, Vermont — Scenery of Lake Champlain — Inns and 
Boarding-houses — Return to Boston. 

June 18. — An excellent steam-packet carried us 
along the northern coast of Lake Ontario, from Toronto 
to Kingston, from whence I made a geological excm-- 
sion to Gannanoquoi. From Kingston we then de- 
scended the St. Lawrence to Montreal. The scenery of 
the Thousand Islands and of the rapids of the St. Law- 
rence owe much of their beauty to the clearness of the 
waters, which are almost as green, and their foam as 
white, as at the Falls of Niagara. 

On approaching Montreal we seemed to be entering 
a French province. The language and costume of the 
peasants and of the old beggars, the priests with their 
breviaries, the large crosses on the public roads, with 
the symbols of the Crucifixion, the architecture of the 
houses, with their steep roofs, large casement windows, 
and, lastly, the great Catholic cathedral rising in state, 
with its two lofty towers, carried back our thoughts to 
Normandy and Brittany, where we spent the corre- 
sponding season of last year. The French spoken in 
those provinces of the mother country is often far less 

150 



LYELUS TRAVELS 157 

correct, and less easy to follow, that that of the Cana- 
dians, whose manners are very prepossessing, much 
softer and more polite than those of their Anglo-Saxon 
Fellow-countrymen, however superior the latter may 
be in energy and capability of advancement. 

Quebec, with its citadel and fortifications crowning 
the precipitous heights which overhang the St. Law- 
rence, and where the deep and broad river is enlivened 
with a variety of shipping, struck us as the most pic- 
turesque city we had seen since we landed in America. 
We were glad to meet with some old friends among the 
officers of the garrison, who accompanied us to the 
Falls of Montmorency, and other places in the neigh- 
borhood. Their task in maintaining discipline in their 
corps, in preventing the desertion of soldiers, and 
keeping the peace along the frontier, has been more 
irksome than in quelling the rebellion. 

July 5th. — Returning to Montreal after our excursion 
to Quebec, we crossed the St. Lawrence on our way 
southward to La Prairie. On looking back over the 
river at Montreal, the whole city seemed in a blaze of 
light, owing to the fashion here of covering the houses 
with tin, which reflected the rays of the setting sun, 
so that every roof seemed a mirror. Behind the city 
rose its steep and shapely mountain, and in front were 
wooded islands, and the clear waters of the St. Law- 
rence sweeping along with a broad and rapid current. 
At the barracks in La Prairie, a regiment of hussars 
was exercising — a scene characteristic of the times. On 
the way to Lake Champlain we slept at St. John's, 



158 LYELUS TRAVELS 

where I counted under the eaves of the stable of our 
inn more than forty nests of a species of swallow with 
a red breast. The head of a young bird was peeping 
out of each nest, and the old ones were flying about, 
feeding them. The landlord told me, that they had 
built there for twenty years, but missed the two years 
when the cholera raged, for at that time there was a 
scarcity of insects. Our host also mentioned, that in 
making an excavation lately near Prattsburg, about 
1000 of these birds were found hybernating in the sand; 
a tale for the truth of which I do not vouch; but it 
agrees with some old accounts of the occasional hy- 
bernation of our swallows in similar situations. 

We next crossed Lake Champlain to Burlington, in 
Vermont, in a steamboat, which, for neatness, elegance, 
and rapidity, excelled any we had yet beheld. The 
number of travellers has been sensibly thinned this year 
by the depressed state of commerce. The scenery of 
this lake is deservedly much admired. To the w^est 
we saw the principal range of mountains in the State 
of New York, Mount Marcy, the highest, attaining an 
elevation of upwards of 5400 feet. It is still (July 6th) 
capped with snow, but the season is unusually late. 

July 9th. — From Burlington I crossed the Green 
Mountains of Vermont, passing by Montpelier, to 
Hanover. Here we paid a visit to Professor Hubbard, 
at Dartmouth College, and then returned through 
New Hampshire by Concord to Boston. Since we had 
left that city in May, we had travelled in little more 
than two months a distance of 2500 miles on railways, 



LYELUS TRAVELS 159 

in steamboats, and canoes, in public and private car- 
riages, without any accident, and having always found 
it possible so to plan our journey from day to day, as to 
avoid all fatigue and night travelling. We had usually 
slept in tolerable inns, and sometimes in excellent 
hotels in small towns, and had scarcely ever been 
interrupted by bad weather. I infer, from the dismay 
occasionally expressed by Americans when we pursued 
our journey, in spite of rain, that the climate of the 
States must be always as we found it this year — won- 
derfully more propitious to tourists than that of the 
'^old country/' though it is said to be less favourable 
to the health and complexion of Europeans. 

I ventured.on one or two occasions in Canada, when 
I thought that the inns did not come up to the reason- 
able expectations of a traveller, to praise those of the 
United States. I was immediately assured that if in 
their country men preferred to dine at ordinaries, or 
to board with their families at taverns, instead of cul- 
tivating domestic habits like the English, nothing 
would be more easy than to have fine hotels in small 
Canadian towns. This led me to inquire how many 
families, out of more than fifty whom we had happened 
to visit in our tour of eleven months in the United 
States, resided in boarding-houses. I found that there 
was not one; and that all of them lived in houses of 
their own. Some of these were in the northern and 
middle, others in the southern and western states; 
some in affluent, others in very moderate circum- 
stances; they comprised many merchants as well as 



160 LYELVS TRAVELS 

lawyers, ministers of religion, political, literary, and 
scientific men. 

Families who are travelling in the U. S., and strangers 
like ourselves, frequent hotels much more than in 
England, from the impossibility of hiring lodgings. 
In the inns, however, good private apartments may 
be obtained in all large towns, which, though dear for 
the United States, are cheap as contrasted with hotels 
in London. It is doubtless true that not only bachelors, 
but many young married couples, occasionally escape 
from the troubles of house-keeping in the United 
States, where servants are difficult to obtain, by re- 
treating to boarding-houses; but the fact of our never 
having met with one instance among pur own ac- 
quaintances inclines me to suspect the custom to be 
far less general than many foreigners suppose. 

It is now the fourth time we had entered Boston, 
and we were delighted again to see our friends, some 
of whom kindly came from their country residences to 
welcome us. Others we visited in Nahant, where they 
had retreated from the great heat, to enjoy the sea- 
breezes. The fire-flies were rejoicing in the warm even- 
ings. Ice was as usual in abundance; the iceman 
calling as regularly at every house in the morning as 
the milkman. Pine-apples from the West Indies were 
selling in the streets in wheelbarrows. I bought one 
of good size, and ripe, for a shilling, which would have 
cost twelve shillings or more in London. After a short 
stay, we set sail in the Caledonia steam-packet for 
Halifax. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

Halifax — High Tides in the Bay of Fundy — Progress and Re- 
sources of Nova Scotia — Promotion of Science — Nova Scotians 
"going home" — Return to England. 

July 16, 1842. — When I went on board the Cale- 
donia at Boston, I could hardly believe that it was as 
large as the Acadia, in which we had crossed the At- 
lantic from Liverpool, so familiar had I now become 
with the greater dimensions of the steamers which 
navigate the Hudson and other large American rivers. 

The day after my arrival in Nova Scotia, a fellow- 
passenger in the coach from Halifax to Windsor, a 
native of the country, and who, from small beginnings, 
had acquired a large fortune, bore testimony to the 
rapid strides which the province had made, within his 
recollection, by deploring the universal increase of 
luxury. He spoke of the superior simplicity of manners 
in his younger days, when the wives and daughters of 
farmers were accustomed to ride to church, each on 
horseback behind their husbands and fathers, whereas 
now they were not content unless they could ride there 
in their own carriage. 

In spite of the large extent of barren and siliceous 
soil in the south, and, what is a more serious evil, those 
seven or eight months of frost and snow which crowd 

161 



162 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

the labours of the agriculturist into so brief a season, 
the resources of this province are extremely great. 
They have magnificent harbours, and fine navigable 
estuaries, large areas of the richest soil gained from 
the sea, vast supplies of coal and gypsum, and abun- 
dance of timber. 

Not a few of the most intelligent and thriving in- 
habitants are descended from loyalists, who fled from 
the United States at the time of the declaration of 
independence. 

I had arranged with Captain Bayfield, whom I had 
not seen for many years, that we should meet at Pic- 
tou, and the day after my arrival there, his surveying 
ship, the Gulnare, sailed into the harbour. I spent a 
day on board that vessel, and we then visited together 
the Albion Klines, from whence coal is conveyed by a 
railway to the estuary of the East River, and there 
shipped. Mr. Richard Brown, whose able co-operation 
in my geological inquiries I have before acknowledged, 
had come from Cape Breton to meet me, and with him 
and Mr. Dawson I examined the cliffs of the East 
River, accompanied by the superintendent of the Al- 
bion Mines, Mr. Poole, at whose house we were most 
kindly received. Here, during a week of intense heat, 
in the beginning of August (1842), I was frequently 
amused by watching the humming-birds, being able 
to approach unperceived, by the aid of a Venetian 
blind, to within a few inches of them, while they were 
on the wing. They remained for many seconds poised 
in the air, while sucking the flowers of several climbers 



LYELUS TRAVELS 163 

trailed to the wall on the outside of the window, and 
in this position the head and body appeared motion- 
less, brilliant with green and gold plumage, and the 
wings invisible, owing to the rapidity of their motion. 
It is wonderful to reflect on the migrating instinct 
which leads these minute creatures from the distant 
Gulf of Florida to a country buried constantly under 
deep snow for seven or eight months in the year. 

After leaving Pictou, I made an expedition with 
Mr. Dawson, and at Truro we were joined by Mr. Dun- 
can, by whose advice we started at an early hour each 
morning in a boat, after the great tidal wave or bore 
had swept up the estuary, and were then carried ten, 
fifteen or twenty miles with great rapidity up the 
river, after which as the tide ebbed, we came down 
at our leisure, landing quietly wherever we pleased, at 
various points where the perpendicular cliffs offered 
sections on the right or left bank. 

On one occasion, when I was seated on the trunk of 
a fallen tree, on a steep sloping beach about ten feet 
above the level of the river, I was warned by my com- 
panion that, before I had finished my sketch, the tide 
might float off me and the tree, and carry both down 
to the Basin of Minas. Being incredulous, I looked 
at my watch, and observed that the water remained 
nearly stationary for the first three minutes, and .then, 
in the next ten, rose about three feet, after which it 
gained very steadily but more slowly, till I was ob- 
liged to decamp. A stranger, when he is looking for 
shells on the beach at low tide, after the hot sun has 



164 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

nearly dried up the sandy mud, may well be surprised 
if told that in six hours there will be a perpendicular 
column of salt water sixty feet high over the spot on 
which he stands. 

The proprietor of one of the large gypsum quarries 
showed me some wooden stakes, dug up a few days 
before by one of his labourers from a considerable 
depth in a peat bog. His men were persuaded that 
they were artificially cut by a tool, and were the relics 
of aboriginal Indians; but having been a trapper of 
beavers in his younger days, he knew well that they 
owed their shape to the teeth of these creatures. We 
meet with the skulls and bones of beavers in the fens 
of Cambridgeshire, and elsewhere in England. May 
not some of the old tales of artificially cut wood oc- 
curring at great depths in peat and morasses, which 
have puzzled many a learned antiquary, admit of the 
like explanation? 

I never travelled in any country where my scientific 
pursuits seemed to be better understood, or were more 
zealously forwarded, than in Nova Scotia, although I 
went there^almost without letters of introduction. At 
Truro, having occasion to go over a great deal of 
ground in different directions, on two successive days, 
I had employed two pair of horses, one in the morning 
and the other in the afternoon. The postmaster, an 
entire stranger to me, declined to receive payment for 
them, although I pressed him to do so, saying that 
he heard I was exploring the country at my own ex- 
pense, and he wished to contribute his share towards 



LYELUS TRAVELS 165 

scientific investigations undertaken for the public 
good. 

We knoWy on the authority of the author of '^Sam 
Shck," unless he has belied his countrymen, that some 
of the Blue Noses (so called from a kind of potato 
which thrives here) are not in the habit of setting a 
very high value, either on their own time or that of 
others. To this class, I presume, belonged the driver 
of a stage-coach, who conducted us from Pictou to 
Truro. Drawing in the reins of his four horses, he in- 
formed us that there were a great many wild raspberries 
by the road-side, quite ripe, and that he intended to 
get off and eat some of them, as there was time to spare, 
for he should still arrive in Truro by the appointed 
hour. It is needless to say that all turned out, as there 
was no alternative but to wait in the inside of a hot 
coach, or to pick fruit in the shade. Had the same 
adventure happened to a traveller in the United States, 
it might have furnished a good text to one inclined to 
descant on the inconvenient independence of manners 
which democratic institutions have a tendency to cre- 
ate. Doubtless, the political and social circumstances 
of all new colonies promote a degree of equality which 
influences the manners of the people. There is here 
no hereditary aristocracy — no proprietors who can let 
their lands to tenants — no dominant sect, with the 
privileges enjoyed by a church establishment. The in- 
fluence of birth and family is scarcely felt, and the re- 
semblance of the political and social state of things to 
that in the United States is striking. 



166 LY ELL'S TRAVELS 

It is no small object of ambition for a Nova Scotian 
to "go home/' which means to "leave home, and see 
England." However much his cm-iosity may be 
gratified by the tour, his vanity, as 1 learn from sev- 
eral confessions made to me, is often put to a severe 
trial. It is mortifying to be asked in what part of the 
world Nova Scotia is situated — to be complimented 
on "speaking good English, although an American" — 
to be asked "what excuse can possibly be made for 
repudiation" — to be forced to explain to one fellow 
countryman after another "that Nova Scotia is not 
one of the United States, but a British province." 
All this, too, after having prayed loyally every Sunday 
for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales — after 
having been so ready to go to war about the Canadian 
borderers, the New York sympathisers, the detention 
of Macleod and any other feud! 

Nations know nothing of one another — most true — 
but unfortunately in this particular case the ignorance 
is all on one side, for almost every native of Nova 
Scotia knows and thinks a great deal about England. 
It may, however, console the Nova Scotian to reflect, 
that there are districts in the British Isles, far more 
populous than all his native peninsula, which the major- 
ity of the English people never heard of, and respect- 
ing which, if they were named, few could say whether 
they spoke Gaelic, Welsh, or Irish, or what form of 
religion the greater part of them professed. 

August 18. — We left Halifax in the steamship Co- 
lumbia, and in nine days and sixteen hours were at the 



LYELUS TRAVELS 167 

pier at Liverpool. This was the ninetieth voyage of 
these Hahfax steamers across the Atlantic, without 
any loss, and only one case of detention by putting 
back for repairs. As we flew along in the railway car- 
riage between Liverpool and London, my eye, so long 
accustomed to the American landscape, was struck 
with the dressy and garden-like appearance of all the 
fields, the absence of weeds, and the neatness of the 
trim hedgerows. We passed only one unoccupied 
piece of ground, and it was covered with heath, then 
in full blossom, a plant which we had not seen from 
the time we crossed the Atlantic. Eight hours con- 
veyed us from sea to sea, from the estuary of the Mer- 
sey to that stream which Pope has styled ''the Father 
of the British Floods." Whatever new standard for 
measuring the comparative size of rivers I had ac- 
quired in my late wanderings, I certainly never beheld 
''the swelling waters and alternate tides" of Father 
Thames with greater admiration than after this long 
absence, or was ever more delighted to find myself once 
more in the midst of the flourishing settlement which 
has grown up upon his banks. 



THE END. 



NOTES 

15, 1. Lyell wrote of his leaving Liverpool in 1845: Em- 
barked with my wife at Liverpool, in the Britannia, one of the 
Cunard line of steamships, bound for Halifax and Boston. On 
leaving the wharf, we had first been crammed, with a crowd of 
passengers and heaps of luggage, into a diminutive steamer, 
which looked like a toy by the side of the larger ship of 1200 
tons, in which we were to cross the ocean. I was reminded, 
however, by a friend, that this small craft was more than three 
times as large as one of the open caravels of Columbus, in his 
first voyage, which was only 15 tons burden, and without a 
deck. It is, indeed, marvelous to reflect on the daring of the 
early adventurers; for Frobisher, in 1576, made his way from 
the Thames to the shores of Labrador with two small barks of 
20 and 25 tons each, not much surpassing in size the barge of a 
man-of-war; and Sir Humphrey Gilbert crossed to Newfound- 
land, in 1583, in a bark of 10 tons only, which was lost in a 
tempest on the return voyage. {Second Visit.) 

17, 1. Geological terms occur occasionally in this work. 
Strata are beds of earth and rock of one kind, formed by natural 
causes, each usually consisting of a series of layers. 

18, 1. Sam Slick. A humorous book by Thomas C. Hali- 
burton of Nova Scotia, in which the hero, Sam Slick, exaggerates 
the peculiarities of the Yankee character and dialect. 

2. To us the most novel feature in the architectural aspect 
of the city, was the Bunker Hill Monument, which had been 
erected since 1842; the form of which, as it resembles an Egyptian 
obelisk, and possibly because I had seen the form imitated in 
some of our tall factory chimneys, gave me no pleasure. (Lyell, 
Second Visit.) 

19, 1. From Lyell's Second Visit: The charge for the distance 
of fifty-four miles, from Boston to Portsmouth, was $1.50 each, 
or 6s. 4d. English, which was just half what we had paid three 
weeks before for first-class places on our journey from London to 
Liverpool (21. 10s. for 210 miles) the speed being in both cases 
the same. 

2. In the construction and management of railways, the 
Americans have in general displayed more prudence and economy 

169 



170 NOTES 

than could have been expected, where a people of such sanguine 
temperament were entering on so novel a career of enterprise. 
Annual dividends of seven or eight per cent, have been returned 
for a large part of the capital laid out on the New England rail- 
ways, and on many others in the northern states. The cost of 
passing the original bills through the state parliaments has 
usually been very moderate, and never exorbitant; the lines 
have been carried as much as possible through districts where 
land was cheap; a single line only laid down where the traffic did 
not justify two; high gradients resorted to, rather than incur the 
expense of deep cuttings; tunnels entirely avoided; very little 
money spent in building station-houses; and except where the 
population was large, they have been content with the speed of 
fourteen or sixteen miles an hour. It has, moreover, been an 
invariable maxim "to go for numbers," by lowering the fares so 
as to bring them watliin the reach of all classes. Occasionally, 
when the mtercourse between two rich and populous cities, like 
New York and Boston, has excited the eager competition of rival 
companies, they have accelerated the speed far beyond the usual 
average; and we were carried from one metropolis to the other, a 
distance of 239 miles, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, in a 
commodious, lofty, and well-ventilated car, the charge being 
only three dollars, or thirteen shillings. (Lyell, Second Visit.) 

20, 1. Observe the use of the word "avenues." 

22, 1. Western steamers, notwithstanding their size, drew 
very little w-ater, for they are constructed for rivers which rise 
and fall very rapidly. They cannot quite realize the boast of a 
western captain, "that he could sail wherever it was damp "; 
but I was assured that some of them could float in two feet of 
water. (Lyell, Second Visit.) 

2. Basalt is usually of a dark color. There are immense beds 
of it in some regions; and at the Giant's Causeway, on the north 
of Ireland, the columns are distinctly formed. 

37, 1. Carboniferous. Coal-bearing. 

39, 1. This incident illustrates one phase of the prevailing 
financial disturbance. 

2. Among the most common singularities of expression are 
the following: "I should admire to see him " for "I should like 
to see him; " "I want to know " and "Do tell," both exclama- 
tions of surprise, answering to our "Dear me." These last, how- 
ever, are rarely heard in society above the middling class. Occa- 
sionally I was as much puzzled as if I was reading Tarn o'Shanter, 
as, for example, "out of kittel " means "out of order." (Lyell, 
Second Visit.) 

40, 1. Maple sugar is made usually in the early spring. 



NOTES 171 

55, 1. When I asked how it happened that in so populous 
and rich a city as Boston there was at present (October, 1845) 
no regular theatre, I was told, among other reasons, that if I 
went into the houses of persons of the middle and even humblest 
class, I should often find the father of a family, instead of seek- 
ing excitement in a shilHng gallery, reading to his wife and four 
or five children, one of the best modern novels, which he had 
purchased for twenty-five cents, whereas, if they could all have 
left home, he could not for many times that sum have taken 
them to the play. They often buy, in two or three successive 
numbers of a penny newspaper, entire reprints of the tales of 
Dickens, Bulwer, or other popular writers. (Lyell, Second Visit.) 

58, i. Quoted from Virgil's jEneid: "What the Greeks and 
the merciless Achilles left." 

68, 1. Quotation from Virgil's ^neirf.- " As the cypresses are 
wont to tower above the modest shrubs." 

2. American histories give still another reason for the choice 
of a site on the Potomac for the national capitol. 

98, 1. Mount Vernon is now maintained in excellent condi- 
tion. 

108, 1. Among other novelties since 1841, we observe with 
pleasure the new fountains in the midst of the city suppHed from 
the Croton waterworks, finer than any which I remember to have 
seen in the centre of a city since I was last in Rome. 

Among the new features of the city we see several fine churches, 
some built from their foundations, others finished since 1841. 
The two most conspicuous of the new edifices are Episcopalian, 
Trinity and Grace Church. The position of Trinity Church is 
admirably chosen, as it forms a prominent feature in Broadway, 
the principal street, and in another direction looks down Wall 
street, the great centre of city business. It is therefore seen 
from great distances in this atmosphere, so beautifully clear 
even at this season, when every stove is lighted, and when the 
thermometer has fallen twenty degrees below the freezing point. 

Next to the new churches and fountains, the most striking 
change observable in the streets of New York since 1841, is the 
introduction of the electric telegraph, the posts of which, about 
30 feet high and 100 yards apart, traverse Broadway, and are 
certainly not ornamental. ... I learned that the length of 
hne completed in 1846, amounted to above 1600 miles, and in 
1848 there were more than 5000 miles of wire laid down. (Lyell, 
Second Visit.) 

136, 1. Consult Dictionary for definition of "tropical." 

138, 1. At Mr. Longworth's we saw a beautiful piece of 
sculpture, an ideal head called Ginevra, by Hiram Powers, who 



172 NOTES 

had sent it from Rome as a present to his first patron. It ap- 
peared to me worthy of the genius of the sculptor of " Eve " and 
the "Greek Slave." Thorwaldsen, when he saw Powers' "Eve," 
foretold that he would create an era in his art; and not a few of 
the Italians now assign to him the first place in the " Natu- 
rahsta " school, though assuredly there is much of the ideal also 
in his conceptions of the beautiful. It augurs well for the future 
cultivation of the fine arts in the United States, that the Ameri- 
cans are as proud of their countryman's success as he himself 
could desire. (Lyell, Second Visit.) 
142, 1. Equus caballus. Horse. 

149, 1. Compare Tucker's estimates with the actual census 
returns. Population of the United States: 1850, 23,191,876; 
ISGO, 31,443,321; 1870, 38,558,371; 1880, 50,155,783; 1890, 
62,622,250; 1900, 76,303,387. 

150, 1. Carburetted hydrogen. A compound of carbon and 
hydrogen forming an illuminating gas. 

152, 1. Daguerreotype. An early kind of photograph, 
named after its inventor. 

2. Father Hennepin. A noted French missionary and ex- 
plorer of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi. 



C 310 88 



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BINDERY INC. p] 

a. AUG 88 

N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 






